A story by Misha Nogha, “Chippoke No Gomi,” first published in the Witness Anthology of Experimental Fiction, 1989, and later in her collection, Ke Qua Hawk As, published by Wordcraft of Oregon in 1994, has been included in the Wesleyen Anthology of Science Fiction which will be released in summer of 2010.

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction “is designed to provide a historical survey of the genre and includes 52 works ranging from Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” published in 1844 to Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” (2008). The anthology is geared for classroom work as well as for the general reader with supplemental material for a website being planned concurrently with the release of the book.

For more information on the anthology and it table of contents, please visit the website: http://dynamicsubspace.net/2010/01/06/amazing-new-science-fiction-collection-the-wesleyan-anthology-of-science-fiction/

Derek Alger, editor of the on-line magazine, PIF, has posted an interview with Lance Olsen which I highly recommend. I would particularly point to Lance’s advice to writers. Words of wisdom!!! 

http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/939/

David Memmott’s long narrative poem, “Where the Yellow Brick Road Turns West,” has been published as an e-chapbook with an introduction by George Venn on Poets and Writers-Chaps, “World Voices,” Web del Sol. The e-chapbook series is edited by Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy. The poem is included in Memmott’s latest collection of poems, Giving It Away. Link to the e-chapbook is on the Wordcraft of Oregon homepage under Giving It Away.

The co-editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield sent the following comment to the author, Linda Lappin:

“It’s not an easy or simple thing to write fiction which keeps faith with the life it is based on, so the reader will say, ‘There is nothing here that falsifies’, as well as ‘This has the imaginative flair of story telling, the freedom of its form.’  Linda Lappin has immersed herself in Mansfield’s life, and emerged from it with a story to narrate on her own terms; a fiction charged with the  enthusiasm of a  good researcher, and carried through with a novelist’s verve.”

In the October/November 2009 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle (Vol. 42, Number 2) readers have an opportunity to learn more about Duff Brenna, author of the contemporary American classic, The Book of Mamie, re-issued by Wordcraft of Oregon. Brenna is the author of six published novels and is the Fiction Editor of the on-line literary magazine, Perigee www.perigee-arts.com .  The interview reveals a writer of breadth and deep understanding of the human condition.

The interview was conducted by another Wordcraft of Oregon author, Thomas E. Kennedy, whose novel, In The Company of Angels, will be released in March 2010 by Bloomsbury Books and another scheduled for the following year. Bloomsbury has indicated the desire to publish all four of Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet. In The Company of  Angels was originally published as Greene’s Summer by the Ireland publisher, Wynkin de Worde. The Bloomsbury edition recently received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6701098.html 

Wordcraft of Oregon has published four of Thomas E. Kennedy’s books and we’re thrilled to see him finally get the attention he so richly deserves. Duff Brenna has two books either near completion or being circulated, the memoir Dancing With Mother and a new novel, Separation Anxiety.

We are blessed to have a relationship with these two great writers.

The 2009 Washington State Book Awards have been announced. This is the 43rd year for the award which is given to a book based on the strength of the publication’s literary merit, lasting importance and overall quality. It was formerly called the Governor’s Writers Awards.

White Jade and Other Stories by Alex Kuo was a finalist in the fiction category.

All About Lulu, Jonathan Evison won the fiction award.

Other finalists were:

Guernica, Dave Boling

Oxygen, Carol Casselia

The Other, David Guterson

The 2009 Washington State Book Awards are sponsored by the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library. Authors will be honored at a public ceremony at 7 p.m. Wednesday, October 14th, at a public ceremony at the Seattle Public Library, at the Central Library branch, in the Microsoft Auditorium. The event, which is presented in partnership with the Elliott Bay Book Co., will feature remarks and readings by the award recipients. Books will be available for purchase and a reception and book signing will follow the program.

Wordcraft of Oregon is proud to announce that Leslie What’s story collection, Crazy Love, was named a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in fiction (the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction).

Other finalists were:

Miriam Gershow, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau)

Gina Ochsner, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Portobello Books)

Barbara Pope, Cezanne’s Quarry (Pegasus Books)

Jon Raymond, Livability: Stories (Bloomsbury)

The fiction this year was judged by Robert Olmstead. The winner will be announced at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony, which takes place Monday, October 26, 2009 at the Gerding Theater at the Armory. Tom Bissell will hose and tickets aare available at www.brownpapertickets.com

Congratulations to all the finalists. More information on finalists for other categories can be found at the Literary Arts, Inc. website www.literary-arts.org and www.paperfort.blogsppot.com

John Griswold has won the Delta Award from Friends of the Morris Library (Southern Illinois University-Carbondale) in recognition of an individual or organization that has written/published about southern Illinois with distinction. This recognition is primarily for his novel, A Democracy of Ghosts. Griswold joins such luminaries as John Gardner, Paul Simon and Robert Coover in winning this award. Congratulations, John!

Wordcraft of Oregon received news today that Ellen Waterston’s book, Between Desert Seasons, was selected as the winner of the 2009 Willa Award for Poetry from Women Writing the West and representing the best of 2008 published literature for women’s stories set in the American West.

Chosen by professional librarians, historians, and university affiliated educators, the winning authors and their books will be honored at the 15th Annual Conference, to be held at the University of California, Los Angeles, Conference Center, September 11 – 13, 2009.

Winners in other categories included:

Contemporary Fiction: Last Cowgirl, by Jana Richman (William Morrow/HarperCollins

Creative Nonfiction: Salt in Our Blood: The Memoir of a Fisherman’s Wife, by Michele Longo Eder (Dancing Moon Press)

Scholarly Nonfiction: Full-Court Quest: The Girls From Fort Shaw Indian School, Basketball Champions of theWorld, by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith (University of Oklahoma)

Historical Fiction: Charley’s Choice: The Life and Times of Charley Parkhurst, by Fern J. Hill (Infinity Publishing)

Original Softcover Fiction (Trade or Mass Market): Buffalo Bill’s Defunct: A Latouche County Mystery, by Sheila Simonson (Perseverance Press/John Daniel and Co.)

Children’s/Young Adult Fiction & Nonfiction: Dreams on the Oregon Trail, by Barbara Linsley (Whitehall Publishing)

WWW will be seeking entries for the 2010 Willa Literary Awards, honoring books published in 2009. The deadline for submission is February 1, 2010.

WWW is a non-profit association of writers and other literature oriented professionals, writing and promoting the Women’s West. Membership is open to any person worldwide who shares these interests. For more information about the WILLA Awards, Women Writing the West, or the 15th Annual Conference, please visit: womenwritingthewestdotorg, or write c/o Joyce Lohse, WWW Adminstrator, 8547 E. Arapahoe Rd. #J-541, Greenwood Village, CO 80112-1436

The July reading in Stayton’s Second Sundays Series of Poetry Readings, to be held Sunday, July 12, will feature a poet from western Oregon, Margaret Chula of Portland, and one from eastern, David Memmott of La Grande, both reading from unusual new books and, as part of the series’ continuing celebration of Oregon’s sesquicentennial, from past or elder Oregon poets who have influenced them. The reading will take place from 3 to 5 p.m. in the studio of artist Paul Toews at 349 N. Third Ave., where it shares space with the Stayton Friends of the Library Used Bookstore. Admission will be free; donations are appreciated. Books by both featured poets will be for sale at the reading, and they will sign copies. Audience members are invited to bring one or two short poems to share during an open part of the reading.

Margaret Chula will read poems in the voices of Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps—poems written in a cross-arts collaboration with quilt artist Cathy Erickson. These poems are collected, and the corresponding quilts by Erickson are beautifully reproduced, in their book What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, just released by Katsura Press. The book also contains historical photos and texts, as well as accounts by Chula and Erickson of the inspiration and process from which their works emerged. Chula is steeped in Japanese culture, having lived for 12 years in Kyoto, where she studied the Japanese traditional arts of woodblock printing and flower arranging, as well as teaching creative writing. Her work in the Japanese poetic forms of haiku and tanka has garnered many awards and is collected in several earlier books—Grinding My Ink (1993), This Moment (1995), Always Filling, Always Full (2001), The Smell of Rust (2003). She also co-authored, with Rich Youmans, a collection of linked haibun, Shadow Lines (2000). With the support of grants from Literary Arts and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, she has worked collaboratively with visual artists, musicians, and dancers.

David Memmott will be reading from Giving It Away, a comprehensive collection of poems written over many years, published this spring by Wordcraft of Oregon. The book’s cover art is a swirling and colorful digital work by the poet, and black and white digital pieces by him serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s eight parts. Included within those parts are poems of family, and poems of place, political poems and environmental poems, lyric poems and long narrative poems, all reflecting an expansive vision. Memmott writes and publishes both poetry and fiction, including speculative as well as realistic works. Recent work includes a chapbook of poems, Watermarked (Traprock Books, 2004); a short story collection, Shadow Bones, and a postcyberpunk novel, Primetime. Poems and stories appear in both mainstream and genre magazines and anthologies, and his speculative work has been recognized with a Rhysling Award. Memmott is editor and publisher of Wordcraft of Oregon, which has been awarded three fellowships from Literary Arts.

Now in its eighth year, Stayton’s Second Sunday Series of Poetry Readings is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Marion Cultural Development Corporation, which also provides funding for donation of featured poets’ books to the Stayton Public Library. The July 12th reading will be the last of this season. There will be no reading in August, when the series takes its annual summer vacation. Monthly readings will resume in September. For more information, contact series coordinator Eleanor Berry at 503-859-3045 or eberry@wvi.com.