One of the many opportunities to hear excellent local and regional writers’ work occurs three times a year as part of the Beacon Hill Reading Series. Since its inception, Beacon Hill has evolved into a crucial connection between diverse literary communities, featuring upcoming writers alongside more established ones. The series has showcased over 60 authors, including writers from Spokane, like Sharma Shields, Bruce Holbert and Shawn Vestal, as well as writers from across the Northwest and beyond. Join these excellent wordsmiths for a night of poetry and prose to kick off Get Lit!
Tod Marshall’s poetry collections include Bugle, The Tangled Line, and Dare Say. He has also published a collection of his interviews with contemporary poets, Range of the Possible, and an attendant anthology of work by the interviewed poets, Range of Voices. His work has been published in several journals, including The Southern Review, The American Poetry Review, Volt, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He lives in Spokane and directs the writing concentration and coordinates the visiting writers series at Gonzaga University.
S. M. Hulse received her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon and was the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her debut novel, Black River, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January 2015 and has been named an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce title for Winter/Spring 2015. Her stories have appeared in Willow Springs, Witness, and Salamander. A horsewoman and fiddler, she has spent time in Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon.
Jeremy Pataky's debut book of poetry, Overwinter, was published by University of Alaska Press in the Alaska Literary Series. He earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. His work has appeared in Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, The Southeast Review, and in many others, includes several anthologies. He earned an MFA at the University of Montana and is a founding board member of 49 Writers, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the artistic development of writers throughout Alaska, fostering a writing community, and building an audience for literature. He divides his time between Anchorage and his property near McCarthy, Alaska, in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
The Beacon Hill Reading Series features both local and regional authors. Meant to unite the various literary communities of Spokane, the series aims also to make well-crafted writing accessible to a general audience. It is curated and co-hosted by writers Maya Jewell Zeller, Laura Read, and Gwen James. The series is free and open to the public.
Kate and Richard Vander Wende take on Sharma Shield’s Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac:
Kate Vita & Richard Vander Wende have been supporting each other’s creative efforts since 1983, when they met as students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
Beginning in the early ‘90s, Kate worked as a background artist and color designer for a number of animated series, including “Ren & Stimpy”, “Duckman” and “Squirrel Boy”. After moving to Spokane in 1994, she expanded her range of artistic expression to include the performing arts, acting and designing sets for theater, television and film. In 2014, she began a series of small paintings, 100 of which were shown at the Saranac Art Projects gallery in March of 2015. Those works can be viewed at: www.katevita.blogspot.com.
Richard has spent most of his career trying to make things that don’t exist seem real- primarily in the service of others, like George Lucas and the Walt Disney company. What that’s about, or why that’s important, he’s not quite sure. In 1994, he was recruited by Robyn & Rand Miller to co-design & direct the interactive game “RIVEN; the Sequel to MYST”. Which is how he & Kate came to Spokane. Relics from that era persist on his website: www.vanderwende.com
The artists, on what they loved about The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac:"For Sharma’s window, we wanted to try to capture one of our favorite aspects of her stories: that wonderful contrast between the natural world - in its raw and grand totality, dangling dark underparts fully exposed - and the artificial world we craft for ourselves by cherry picking the bits that please us and rejecting (sometimes to the point of denying their very existence) the ones that don’t. There’s a fantastic abyss between those two worlds - and Sharma’s right in there with her headlamp on.”
Chelsea and Tobias Hendrickson take on Benjamin Percy’s The Dead Lands:
From the time she could hold a pen, Chelsea has been creating; it’s in her blood. While pursuing her Art & Design degree at PLNU in San Diego, CA she developed a passion for immersive and visceral art pieces. Drawing influence from global travels and time spent studying abroad, artistic expression from all walks of life and creative mediums keep her inspired. As a graphic designer and artist, visual language is Chelsea’s native tongue. From designing promotional materials and branding identities, collaborating with local designers and artists, or making her own illustrations, paintings or printmaking pieces, there is never a dull moment in her life. Her experience ranges from interning with Anthropolgie in San Diego creating detailed window displays, overseeing Visual Merchandising in Spokane’s Apple Store, event design and wedding styling in local weddings, art directing commercial shoots, and collaborating with local designers to create Addy Award winning work in 2014.
This project is a joint collaboration between Window Dressings and Get Lit! We are grateful to Global Credit Union for their sponsorship of both exhibits.
As part of a collaboration with Spokane Arts, Spokane artists and writers are joining to explore the theme of Landmarks. Paired teams of writers & artists will create a collaborative work, which will be installed in the Chase Gallery and on display for 3 months. Featured writers include Emily Gwinn, Ben Cartwright, Erin Davis, Davy Nguyen, Audrey Connor, Christopher Howell, Nicole Sheets, and Ellen Welcker.
Both the exhibit at the Chase Gallery and the reading in City Council Chambers are free and open to the public.
Benjamin Percy’s latest novel is The Dead Lands, a post-apocalyptic story loosely based on Lewis and Clark’s journey across the west. Percy is also the author of the novels Red Moon and The Wilding, as well as two story collections. His works have been published in GQ, Time, and The Wall Street Journal, among other places. Percy has taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Marquette University, and St. Olaf College, as well as the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.
Sharma Shields is the author of the novel The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac and the short story collection Favorite Monster. The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac was selected as a recommended read by many publications, including Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and Shields was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of 25 “stars on the rise” in 2015. Her work has appeared in Electric Lit, The New York Times, Kenyon Review, and Iowa Review, among others. She currently lives in Spokane with her husband and two children.
Each author will read a selection of their work, and then share the stage to take audience questions. Book signing to follow.
GET TICKETS HERE
Parking: Metered parking is available on Riverside Avenue and side streets, and a free parking lot is available on Main Street, just 1/2 a block down from Riverside Place. Attendees of events at Riverside Place do not need to pay. Get Lit! volunteers will be stationed at the entrances on Riverside Avenue and Main to answer questions and guide you to the Commandery Room inside Riverside Place.
Get Lit! is pleased to announce the 4th annual Pie & Whiskey reading.
Hosted by Sam Ligon, fiction writer, editor of Willow Springs, and associate professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, along with Kate Lebo, author of Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour, and Butter, the event features thirteen authors reading flash fiction, flash nonfiction, and poetry inspired by the following quotes about everyone’s favorite food and drink:
“Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.”
--New York Times, May 3, 1902
“Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.”
--WC Fields
Pies served at the event will be baked by Kate Lebo, with help from other heroic pie bakers of Spokane. Lost Horse Press will produce a chapbook featuring the twelve pieces written for Pie & Whiskey, with the books hand-stitched by EWU students. The chapbook will be for sale at the event.
The 2015 Pie & Whiskey readers include:
Sam Ligon, Kate Lebo, Jess Walter, Thom Caraway, Rachel Toor, Renee D'Aoust, Gary Copeland Lilley, Benjamin Percy, Jordan Hartt, Jessica Lohafer, Tim Greenup, Kristen Young, Don Poffenroth
Pie & Whiskey IV
Thursday, April 23rd
Doors Open 9:00 p.m.
Ages 21+ Only
Cash only
Pie &Whiskey IV is just $2 at the door and is open to the public. $2 gets you a full slice of pie, a beverage, and admission to hear fantastic readings. Non-alcoholic beverages will also be available.
This venue is not ADA-accessible; however, with advance notice, we can make arrangements. Please email getlit@ewu.edu or call 509.828.1498 to let us know you plan to attend. Thank you!
Please note: an RSVP through Sched does not guarantee admittance to the event. First-come, first-served.
Walter Kirn is the author of the memoir Blood Will Out: A Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade. The book tells the story of his friendship with a man named Clark Rockefeller, who turned out to be a con artist named Christian Gerhartsreiter, who was later convicted of murder. The Gerhartsreiter case made national news with revelations of how a man claiming to be a member of the Rockefeller family had obtained money, status, and more by fooling those around him. Kirn traces the course of his friendship with the man from their initial meeting through the moment of revelation and the subsequent trial. Kirn has written seven other books, two of which -- Thumbsucker and Up in the Air -- were adapted into feature films. He is a contributing editor for Time and splits his time between Montana and California.
Shawn Vestal is the author of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize-winning story collection Godforsaken Idaho, as well as a novel to be published in spring 2016. His works have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney's, Ecotone, The Southern Review, and numerous other journals. Vestal writes for Spokane’s Spokesman-Review and teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.
Each author will read a selection of their work, and then share the stage for conversation and audience questions. Book signing to follow.
GET TICKETS HERE
Come bask in the glow of creativity at this dynamic, informal poetry salon. Originating in 18th century Paris, a salon is a gathering centered on discussions of literature, art, and philosophy. Over the course of the evening, each of the featured poets will read some of their own work, answer questions, talk about the writing life, and more. The salon will be moderated by Dr. Jonathan Potter, an accomplished poet and EWU associate professor.
Featured poets include:
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, and currently serves as the poetry editor of New England Review. His third collection of poems, Chord, will be published by Sarabande in 2015.Auntie's will have books for sale by the featured poets. Beverages and food will be available for purchase. The Bartlett is an all-ages venue.
Each author will read for approximately 20 minutes, then join the stage together to answer audience questions. Book signing to follow in the lobby. Venue: Conference Theater, main level, west campus of Spokane Convention Center.
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop where he assisted in editing The Iowa Review and held a Teaching Writing Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, The Spokesman Review, The West Wind Review, Cairn, RiverLit, Del Sol, and 94 Creations and has won annual awards from the Tampa Tribune Quarterly and The Inlander. His non-fiction has appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Spokesman Review, The Daily Iowan, Quarterly West, Ducts, The Sante Fe Writers Project, River Lit, The Portland Review, The San Francisco/Sacramento Book Review and The New York Times and his poetry in RiverLit, The Bacon Review, The Big River Poetry Review. He recently co-authored, with his wife, Signed, Your Student (Kaplan Press) a collection of remembrances of influential teachers recounted by prominent Americans. His first novel Lonesome Animals was released in 2012 by Counterpoint Press. Hour of Lead, his second novel was released in 2014, again by Counterpoint Press.
S. M. Hulse received her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon and was the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her debut novel, Black River, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January 2015 and has been named an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce title for Winter/Spring 2015. Her stories have appeared in Willow Springs, Witness, and Salamander. A horsewoman and fiddler, she has spent time in Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon.
Each author will read, and join the stage together to answer questions. Book signing to follow.
Location: Conference Theater, main floor, Spokane Convention Center
Terry Martin earned a B.A. from Western Washington University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. She’s been fortunate to make her living reading, writing, and talking with students for 35+ years. An English Professor at Central Washington University, she is the recipient of CWU’s Distinguished Professor Teaching Award and the CASE/ Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year Award. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in hundreds of publications and she has edited books, journals and anthologies. Her first book of poems, Wishboats, won the Judges’ Choice Award at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Book Fair in 2000. Her second book, The Secret Language of Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2006. She lives with her family in Yakima, Washington.
Brooke Matson is a Washington poet and educator. She attended Gonzaga University where she received her B.A. in English and her M.A. in Educational Leadership. The Moons, her first full-length collection of poetry, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2012. Her poetry has also been published in Floating Bridge Review (2014), several anthologies, and various issues of RiverLit, for which she was the 2014 Poet in Residence.
Kathryn Hunt
I’m a writer and filmmaker and make my home in Port Townsend, Washington, on the coast of the Salish Sea. My stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sun, Willow Springs, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other publications. A collection of my poems, Long Way Through Ruin, will be published by Blue Begonia Press in September 2013. Kim Barnes, the author of In the Kingdom of Men and In the Wilderness, writes: “Wild in their domesticity, mythical in their realism, ethereal in their lyrical beauty, Hunt’s poems fearlessly explore the boundaries between love and loss, longing and regret. Reading Long Way Through Ruin, I felt myself elevated, suspended, held in the prism of the poet’s intimate and unflinching vision.” I am a Jack Straw Fellow and Helen Whiteley Center Fellow. Dorianne Laux selected a poem from Ruin, “Josephine, 1905, Winlock, Washington” for the Argos Prize.
Emily Gwinn teaches English at Spokane Falls Community College. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Hubbub, Rock and Sling, Pontoon, and The Furnace Review, and her poetry is included in Cave Moon Press’s anthology of poems about food, Broken Circles: A Gathering of Poems for Hunger. Emily also had the pleasure of representing Spokane at the 2014 National Poetry Slam in Oakland, California. She is the recipient of the Tom Pier Prize in Poetry from Allied Arts of Yakima Washington’s Coffeehouse Poetry Series, and her chapbook, Transpiration, was published by Finishing Line Press. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University.
John Whalen has nearly a hundred publications in literary journals and magazines including: River Styx, City Lights, The Greensboro Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, CutBank, Redactions, Dark Horse, and the Hollins Critic. His work has been anthologized twice in Pontoon. He has been a finalist for both the Ruth J. Lilly Award and the National Poetry Series Award. His first full-length poetry collection, Caliban, was published in 2002, and In Honor of the Spigot won Gribble Press's chapbook competition in 2010. In 2014, he won the Floating Bridge Press chapbook award for Above the Pear Trees.
Poet, fiction writer, artist, teacher: Nance Van Winckel does it all, and does it well. In 2013, she published her sixth book of poems, Pacific Walkers (a finalist for the Washington State Book Award), along with her fourth collection of stories, Boneland. 2014 saw the publication of her novel in the form of a scrapbook, Ever Yrs. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and produces a cross-disciplinary art called photo-ems: photographs with small poems and other graphic material blended on top of the original photograph. She has received many awards and honors, including multiple NEA poetry fellowships.
Robert Michael Pyle
Melissa Kwasny
Carlos Reyes
Maya Zeller
Prartho Sereno
Robert McNamara
with music by Leon Atkinson
Robert Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist and a professional writer who has published 17 books and hundreds of papers, essays, stories, and poems. His 1995 book Where Big Foot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide was the subject of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Pyle has a Ph. D. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and in 1974 he founded the Xerces Studies. Between 1976 and 2013, he was a presenter and field trip leader at the annual week-long Family Nature Summits.
Melissa Kwasny consistently relies on the marriage of man and nature to inform her understanding of existence. She is the author of the poetry collections The Archival Birds, Thistle, Reading Novalis in Montana, and The Nine Senses. Kawsny has been a Visiting Writer at many universities such as the University of Montana, Eastern Washington University, Lesley University, and the University of Wyoming.
Robert McNamara teaches in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the University of Washington where he also serves as University Director of the Puget Sound Writing Project. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Incomplete Strangers (2013). He also translated, with the author, The Cat Under the Stairs, a selection of poems by the Bengali poet Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay.
Carlos Reyes is a noted poet, writer, and translator. Reyes lives in Portland, Oregon but travels often to Ireland and frequently visits Spain and Ecuador. Of his work Carolyn Kizer has said, "Mr. Reyes is one of our local and national treasures. His poetry is as clear and strong as his social conscience. One is always struck by his sensual and sensory qualities: the touch, taste, feel, color of things, and his ability to capture a mood, a world, in a handful of lines."
Maya Jewell Zeller lives in Spokane with her family and is an English professor at Gonzaga University. Her first book, Rust Fish, was released in April 2011 by Lost Horse Press and her individual poems appear in journals such as Bellingham Review, West Branch, Cincinnati Review, and Rattle. She has taught writing and literature to high school, college students, fourth graders, and senior citizens, and has been a writer-in-residence in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest.
Prartho Sereno has been teaching poem-making to private and public schools of California since 1999. Sereno has found herself in a bamboo hut in India, a 150-year-old farmhouse in Maine, a spiritual community in Oregon, an uptown apartment in Southern California, and most recently, a bungalow just north of San Francisco. Her first book, everyday Miracles: An A to Z Guide to the Simple Wonders of Life was inspired by the common thing, an ordinary moment. As for her books, Prartho says, “These are book I needed to read, so I wrote them.”
Sam Hamill and Greg Pape unfortunately had to cancel their appearances.
