Winter 2015: Contributors

Authors

Cathy Cain is a writer, artist and retired art teacher living in Oregon. She currently is a Fellow in the Attic Institute’s Atheneum Master Writing Program. Previously a two-year member of the Attic’s Poets Studio, Cathy has also participated in numerous workshops given by Mountain Writers.

Kelly Coughlin is a Fire Lookout at Dutchman Peak in Southern Oregon. She has been a firefighter for US Forest Service since 2001. Having had a long-standing habit of writing and taking pictures wherever she goes, she has documented her fire career in words and pictures. Kelly lives in Portland, Oregon during her off-seasons. She has co-founded a writer’s group, and has also helped select entries for a recent Write Around Portland anthology. In 2013, she won a fellowship to the Tomales Bay “Writing by Writers” conference.

Deborah Dombrowski is a writer and photographer who discovered Portland at the age of 22 and has lived here ever since. She fell in love with the visual world and earned a BFA in photography, but is also drawn to the perceptions and secrets that a poem can hold. Deborah is fascinated by the way a poem accumulates meaning and sound so that it becomes a room that contains comings and goings. Her website brings words and images together to consider the passage of time. Read more about Deborah at www.lightswim.blogspot.com

Christine Dupres (Cowlitz/Cree) is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied Folklore under Doctors Dan Ben Amos and Roger Abrahams. She has been published in the international journal Fabula and the national Journal of American Folklore and Wicazo Sa Review, among others. Her most recent publication with the University of Washington Press (Fall 2014) is a book called Being Cowlitz: How One Tribe Renewed and Sustained Its Identity. Her writing focuses on narrative, identity and contemporary Native issues.

Heather Durham is a restoration ecologist and naturalist currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction through the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. A city dweller with the soul of a hermit, she can often be found in the wild places in and around Portland with a journal, a field guide and a pair of binoculars, head cocked and listening to the birds.

A 2014 Oregon Literary Arts fellow, Stephanie Golisch writes screenplays, short stories, and travel essays. She has spied on penguins in New Zealand and Chile, hiked the Yellow Mountain in China and has been in several traffic jams on the Autobahn. She has been published in Bengal Lights, Mission at Tenth and Word Riot. She has lived in Portland, Oregon for nine years. Read about her adventures on and off the road at www.stephaniegolisch.com.

Christine Gray studied creative writing at Eastern Oregon University and the University of New Orleans. After taking time off to raise a child, she is now excited to re-connect with the writing world. She lives in Portland with her teen-age daughter and two cats.

Suzy Harris lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two dogs. She has two grown children, one who lives in Portland and one in Dubai, UAE. She has taken several writing workshops from Kim Stafford and has a writing partner she meets with weekly to encourage and develop a writing practice.

Allegra Heidelinde grew up in New Mexico and California. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, daughter and, usually, at least one cat. She loves to laugh.

Christa Kaainoa is a writer, rock climber, feminist, activist, life enthusiast, and middle school English teacher living in Portland, Oregon.

Jennifer Kemnitz is an herbalist-poet who writes from a tranquil edge of Portland. Her work has been anthologized in Hildegard: visions and inspiration.

Helen Kerner was first published in the National High School Poetry Anthology many long years ago. She graduated from the University of Washington in Art and promptly entered the corporate world. Helen never stopped writing poetry and has been published in the Marin Poetry Center's annual anthology, as well as in Stories With Grace, a short-lived Pacific Northwest literary journal. In 2007 she published The Journey, a book in poetry and prose about her 1993 bone marrow transplant for leukemia.

Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet whose poems and haiku have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She volunteers as part of VoiceCatcher’s mentorship program. Her chapbook Urban Wild came out in May 2014 from Finishing Line Press. For more information, see www.triciaknoll.com.

Barbara LaMorticella lives in a cabin in the hills outside Portland, Oregon. A founding member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, she’s a long-time poetry host on KBOO. Her second collection of poems, Rain on Waterless Mountain, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She’s the winner of a Bumbershoot Big Book Award, the first Northwest Poets Concord prize, the Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon Literary Arts, and the first Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for Women Writers. Retired from medical transcribing, she cares for her grandchildren, does radio, and agitates for fundamental health care reform.

Margie Lee is a writer and artist living in Portland, Oregon. Growing up on a farm on the Puget Sound, she grew up on a bay surrounded by forested mountains. Her art took her to New York where she exhibited and met her husband, author Robert May. She has written several books and numerous short stories, essays and poems. Her poems have been published in the anthology Saturday Afternoons and in Windfall.

Annie Lighthart started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. Since those first strange days, she published her poetry collection Iron String with Oregon’s own Airlie Press and earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. Annie has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and now teaches poetry workshops through Mountain Writers. She lives in a small green corner of Portland, Oregon and can be reached at her website www.annielighthart.com.

Gypsy Martin is mom to two boys in Camas, Washington, and has achieved minor fame as a lunch lady at their elementary school. Her short fiction has been published online at Journal of Microliterature and in print anthologies, including a short short story in the forthcoming Flash in the Attic: Volume II anthology from Fiction Attic Press. She also received the fourth place prize in the memoir category of the 2012 Writer's Digest Writing Competition for a story about the indignities of homemade underwear.

M.K. Moen’s interest in and commitment to writing began with encouragement from her grandmother who wrote and published poetry in Portland in the 1950s. Most of MK's writing was in support of her career in adult education in Nevada until her retirement and return to Portland, Oregon in 2010. Since then she has relished being part of Oregon's dynamic culture of poets, participating in workshops, classes, and readings. MK writes primarily about nature, family, and philosophy, ideas, perceptions.

Elizabeth Moscoso is an English literature student at Marylhurst University. You can usually find her with her nose in a book, whipping up a new recipe or dreaming about her next adventure.

Jennifer Pratt-Walter's deep reverence for the earth and the interconnected Dream- maker that links all life is expressed in her writing, music and photography. Find her in the garden, riding her horse, playing the harp and blending words into amazing new combinations.

Donna Prinzmetal is a poet, tutor and psychotherapist. She has taught poetry and creative writing for more than 25 years to adults and children. Donna often uses writing to facilitate restoration and healing in her psychotherapy practice. She also tutors and coaches middle and high school students, and edited the Young Voices section of VoiceCatcher’s journal for three issues. Her poems have appeared in many magazines including Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review and The Journal. Her first book, Snow White, When No One Was Looking, was published by CW Books in May 2014.

Hannah Sams spends most of her time putting off doing laundry and putting together mix CDs. Her hobbies include being awful at Spanish, boring people with the fine points of property laws, making silly faces at babies in grocery stores, and coping with bipolar disorder. Once, when her kindergarten class performed a short show for their parents, she climbed off the stage as soon as it ended and began giving everyone her autograph. Hannah grew up in a house on N.E. 65th and Beech in the '90s and her first job was a lemonade stand.

Amy Schutzer’s second novel, Spheres of Disturbance , was published in April 2014 by Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press. Her first novel, Undertow (Calyx Books, 2000), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a Violet Quill Award finalist, and a Today’s Librarian “Best of 2000” Award-winner. She is the recipient of an Astraea Grant for Fiction and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Finishing Line Press published Taking the Scarecrows Down, a chapbook of her poetry, in 2011. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of national literary reviews and magazines. For more information on Amy’s writing and books: www.amyschutzer.com.

Jackie Shannon-Hollis’s work has appeared in journals including The Sun , High Desert Journal, Inkwell, and Slice Magazine. She is a native Oregonian, born and raised in the dry and surrounded by wheat on the east side of the state, now thriving in the cedars and wet on the west side. This essay is a part of a memoir in progress.

Pearl Waldorf is a meaning seeker, a science nerd, a word junky. She wants you to know art is a dying art. She also wants you to know this distinction we make between bodies and minds might as well be a cheese sandwich on mars. Maybe you'd like to share a meal with her sometime. Her partner found a sweet dining room table on craigslist for a hundred bucks and refinished it. Really, all misfits are welcome. Pearl offers psychotherapy, creative process and career consultation in her private practice in SE Portland. She loves her work.

Artists

Brittany Chavez grew up in Colorado, then moved to Portland to attend the Oregon College of Art and Craft. Devoted to school and the close community of the college, she received a BFA in photography in 2013. Now Brittany is concentrating on her own art/writing work outside of "the classroom" while volunteering at Newspace Center for Photography.

Michelle Iris Latham is a visual artist residing in Portland, Oregon. By day she makes signs; by night she can be found experimenting in a variety of media, including printmaking, ink and watercolor. The 'siblings' is an ongoing set of illustrations based on found photographs. Michelle collects and references them as a way of exploring two concepts. The first is the desire to group things together and infer their similarities – in this case this step is short-handed through the titling – in order to see them as a unit. And then, once looking at them together, to begin to see their differences. It is her hope that the images will convey different personalities and stories to each viewer.

A native Oregonian, mixed media painter Erin Leichty graduated from the University of Portland in 2000. Using large palette knives, she applies limestone clay and encaustic medium to her surface, building layers of text, images, ephemera and found objects to construct her stories on panel, layer by layer, pushing the boundaries of materials, daring to combine mediums in new ways. She scrapes, etches and sands back bits and pieces of each layer – unearthing the buried emotions, creating pieces with the history of a life lived in the beautiful, rich place between chaos and freedom.

Kelly Neidig lives and works in Portland, Oregon, creating vibrant abstract landscapes. Her process is meditative and peaceful, slowly building up layers of paint. Her paintings refer to the overall feeling of place without focusing on details. The playful colors become an element that creates a feeling of nostalgia. This allows viewers to call on their memories of place and connect with the painting based on their experiences. Kelly’s work has been included in collections of the Swedish Hospital in Seattle, WA; the Westin Hotel in Cincinnati, OH; and the U.S. Embassy in Doha, Qatar. Her work has also been featured in Traditional Home Magazine and on the TV shows Portlandia and Graceland.

Young Voices

Lily Boyd lives in Portland, Oregon. She likes to hike, swim, play soccer, read and write. She has always found writing to be one of her passions and finds that she is constantly writing a new story. Lily is currently in eighth grade at Beaumont Middle School, and is excited to be moving on to high school where she believes there will be so many amazing memories.

Maya Coseo has lived in Oregon her whole life. She enjoys writing, rowing and reading. Maya only started to enjoy writing after her freshman year journalism class. Now she writes avidly, and mostly short stories for the literary section of her school newspaper. While not writing, reading or doing homework, Maya rows on the Willamette River, a source of inspiration to her. Maya's family also inspires her. One of her uncles writes for a trade magazine, one is pursuing his Ph.D., another is a radio host. In the future, Maya hopes to major in creative writing or English in college.

A freshman at Franklin High School, Berkeley Franklin is a young writer who focuses mainly on fiction. She started writing seriously when she was ten-years-old. Since then, she’s finished two novels.

Audra McNamee is a freshman at Franklin High School, dabbling in writing and drawing and gently meta third-person biographies. She's still trying to figure out why she writes, but it has something to do with excess commas.

Meghana Mysore is a junior at Lake Oswego High School where she gravitates toward all things word: her school's newspaper, the literary magazine, and the event of Poetry Reading on the Speech and Debate team. She is president of her school's Literary and Poetry Club (or, LitPoe as she likes to call it) and has received several regional keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Besides words, she enjoys discovering and learning about new cultures and ideologies, and is always looking for ways to broaden her global perspective.

Poetry Through the magic of language, 20 poets challenge us to write and live bravely.		Prose Five risk-taking voices burn with the fire of transformation.		Artwork Four artists share their diverse sensibilities as confident mark-makers.		Young Voices With clear eyes and articulate voices, five young women confront terrifying aspects of human experience.		Contributors Meet the authors and artists – from first-timers to well-established – who grace our sixth issue with their voices and visions.

LETTER FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR POETRY         A Great Wild Goodness by Annie Lighthart         Going South by Christine Gray         a welcome week by Hannah Sams         Ophelia, at Fifty, in a Blue Blow-up Canoe by Deborah Dombrowski         A Passing Music by Barbara LaMorticella         Girl Fishing with Grandpa by Helen Kerner         Perimeter by Amy Schutzer         Two Poets in the Weight Room by Tricia Knoll         Skeletons by Christa Kaainoa         A Poem for Dany by Suzy Harris         Lineage by Amy Schutzer         The Bucket by M.K. Moen         Bernier River by Christine Dupres         Silence by Margie Lee         Advice by Donna Prinzmetal         Sometimes at Night by Jennifer Pratt-Walter         Fissure by Elizabeth Moscoso         Whale by Cathy Cain         In the Modern World by Annie Lightheart         Love poem to an acquaintance by Allegra Heidelinde         Dialogue between Magician and Tattooist by Christine Gray         Under the sign of the water bearer by Jennifer Kemnitz         city spacious heart by Pearl Waldorf PROSE         Bless Our Great Nation, Zambia! Zambia! by Gypsy Martin         Liminal by Stephanie Golisch         The Tomorrow Fire by Kelly Coughlin         Ablaze by Heather Durham         Left As It Was, It Would Come Apart by Jackie Shannon-Hollis ART         Sibling 1 by Michelle Latham         Sibling 2 by Michelle Latham         Sibling 3 by Michelle Latham         Totem by Kelly Neidig         Stratum by Kelly Neidig         Swift by Kelly Neidig         Breaking Free by Erin Leichty         Capture Threads by Erin Leichty         Hardware by Erin Leichty YOUNG VOICES         Visions on the Playground by Meghana Mysore         Chasing Thunder by Berkeley Franklin         Elegy for Christy by Lily Boyd         Social Media by Maya Coseo         A Hundred Acre Wood by Audra McNamee CONTRIBUTORS