Northwest Author/Poet Kim Stafford brings "The Understory" to Writers' Workshoppe in April 
                                      

In the forest, the life down low, in dim light, is called the understory: salal, thimbleberry, maidenhair fern. In a life, the understory is that dimension of one's own story that has been hidden, saved within, not given to the light: secrets, losses, private stories of what might be, and what might have been. In this workshop, we will let the landscapes of our lives help us reveal our stories—the secrets we are ready to tell. Given light, salal grows tall.

The prevailing idea for the workshop is to reach into the shadows, where stories have been waiting for our attention. Not events, not actions, but stories—the knit knot of connections that surround a moment, a mystery, a silence in our lives. By not telling these mysteries we have, in fact, shaped them, prepared ourselves to acknowledge them, given them a place in our devotions. Now we can write them, freely, within the safe circle of our close attention, and then decide what to do with them, which parts of these stories to share beyond the candlelight.

Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose. His book, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press) is a unique and revealing look at one of America’s best loved poets.

His other books include Having Everything Right: Essays of Place (Sasquatch Books), The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and other Pleseaures of the Writer’s Craft (U.Georgia Press), A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press). 

He has taught writing workshops at Lewis & Clark College for thirty years, and at the annual Fishtrap Writers Gathering and colleges and literary centers across the U.S. and abroad. 


Website: www.kim-stafford.com

    
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