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Live from Enterprise: Fishtrap
Each July, writers gather at Wallowa Lake to read, write, and talk. It's the Fishtrap Summer Gathering. Fishtrap is a non-profit organization with this mission:
To promote clear thinking and good writing in and about the West.
Writer Pamela Steele initially attended Fishtrap as a cook. She is now a published poet (and a former board member of the organization.) Author Bette Husted went to the very first summer workshop. She says Fishtrap gave her the courage to try to tell her stories.
Husted's memoir, Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land, documents her life growing up on a perch of land in Idaho her grandfather had homesteaded. The home was built on land taken from the Nez Perce, and that shadow infused Bette's childhood.
So did joy, love, violence, illness, and isolation — many experiences that could not be voiced aloud. In the memoir, Husted writes:
Struggling to understand it, I realized that our family story is only a very small part of a much larger one. The American West, America itself, the colonizing of four continents. It's easy to get trapped in this bigger story where human bodies and the earth they stand on can become expendable resources, some parts to be grubbed out to make room for others.
Steele's family also homesteaded. Her parents came from West Virginia to join relatives in Wallowa County after her father collapsed his first day working in a coal mine. Despite leaving the mining life, he died when Steele was just six years old. Her mother moved the family back to West Virginia, then Tennessee. Steele says she returned to Oregon as an adult because it was the place she remembered being happy.
Like Husted, Steele has written since childhood. She says being camp cook at Fistrap was a thrill.
I remember seeing writers and thinking, 'Holy cow, that's Kim Stafford!' But they ate like ordinary people. I loved being around them.
Steele and Husted join us at Fishtrap's Gwen and Gladys Coffin House in Enterprise. It's part of our Northwest Passages series, conversations with regional writers.
Have you been to Fishtrap? What did you learn there? What "good writing in and about the West" do you admire? Are there stories, novels or poetry from Eastern Oregon you particularly value?
If you're in Enterprise and would like to join us for the show, you're welcome to come! Please be at the Fishtrap's Coffin House, 400 East Grant Street, by 8:40 Wednesday morning.
Tagged as: books · eastern oregon · fishtrap · literature · northwest passages · writing
Photo credit: Rick Bombaci
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In challenging times like our Great Recession, there is a vein of desperation, hunger, unemployment, foreclosures and even bankruptcies that haven't been seen in living memory. Like Great Depression Artists, this was also a source of inspiration and rich topical material that linked them to the people. This is in contrast to escapism and fantasy, also sources of inspiration. Have you touched on our current challenges in your material?
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Both guest imply that there is a narrative created between a person and the land they inhabit. What shapes that narrative? Living in Salem, OR my whole life (b. 1984) has given me a unique heart/land narrative, specifically in that my narrative was greatly shaped by the changes in demographic, and land use that I grew up around during the late 80's/early 90's i.e. what was once a field is now a shopping center or subdivision. Within in me is this "kind animosity" that I hold against those who don't know/remember "Old Salem," or "the Salem I loved as a child." I feel like they have been cheated to not know "the way we were." Besides written word, what are other ways that we share our unique land/heart narrative?
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I attended Fishtrap last summer. Enrolled in the "memoir classes" with Debra Gwartney - instructor extraordinaire - I was able to move more comfortably, than ever before, in to the telling of the story of a section of my life.
For the writer, there's nothing like sharing work and gaining feedback from fellow writers and an instructor. The days at Fishtrap are filled with instruction, writing, hiking, great conversations, an incredibly beautiful natural setting, deer who are fearless of humans, and evening gatherings where voices rise to resonate in a cathedral ceilinged log house; where applause is heart felt and where, in the end, I stood, for the first time ever, to read a piece from my work.
Fishtrap, the Wallowa Mountains, the writers who gather, the crisp value of the air, the Lake, the orchestration of the days - spectacular and brilliant as those stars at which we tipped our heads back and gazed.
Sincerely,
Skye Leslie
p.s. music too! and a place for kids!
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Let's not forget one of eastern Oregon's favorite writers, and a friend of Fishtrap, William Kittredge (Owning It All, The Next Rodeo). Have any of the writers on today's show been influenced by Kittredge?
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As a young aspiring writer nearly finished with my undergraduate degree and hopefully moving toward a Master of Fine Arts program, I'm wondering about the ways such an insular community can isolate, rather than connect, person to a sense of place. Can a focus on craft, the technical elements of sentence construction, and intentional shaping of narratives distract a writer from other aspects of inspiration? Or are these things, the ways we write, noticeably changed by the places we inhabit, creating a sort of regional style?
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Bette & Pam, Emily, Dave, & Rich, We're listening in as a WR 121 class at BMCC in Pendleton. Thank you for sharing so much of yourselves as writers. My students are falling in love with your works. And thank you to Fishtrap for helping me start a new chapter of my life--albeit coincidentally. I headed to my reading on January 17th of this year with an extra suitcase in the car and escaped a bad chapter in my life and started over. Fishtrap might have saved my life. ~Shaindel Beers
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Comments are now closed.
Hello, Think Out Loud,
I love your series, Northwest Passages, but wish that you would include writers of non-fiction, and not just novelists and poets. We are an often-overlooked, yet very hard working and may spend several years researching an important historical work.