Speakers & Tours to Look Forward to at the Conference

News from Conference co-chair Jane Kirkpatrick

If you haven’t read or heard Becca Lawton, one of our Sunday morning presenters, you are in for a treat! She’s the winner of the 2014 WILLA for her book Junction, Utah  (I’ve read it and it’s great!) and the first winner of the Waterston Desert Literary Prize. Her book Reading Water: Lessons from the River was a finalist for the Foreword Nature Book of the Year Award. 

She’s had three Pushcart Prize nominations and received the Ellen Meloy Award for Desert Writers. She’s also a former river guide including ten seasons on the Grand Canyon. Becca agreed to make her presentation on Sunday for conference attendees not interested in taking the Imperial Stock Ranch tour. 

To help those who are taking the tour still have a taste of Becca’s wisdom, she has also agreed to step in on Saturday to fill a cancellation due to a family need. So on Saturday, Becca will present “Climate, Water and Creative Writing” that will flow into her Sunday presentation but attendance at both is not necessary. Her Sunday presentation is titled “From Raw to Cooked: Climate, Water and Creative Writing in the American West.” What we loved about her proposal was her understanding that words matter, they carry weight, and can inform and move us. Her gifts as both a novelist and non-fiction writer promise great material for all writers. Her classes are Saturday 1:25pm to 2:25pm and Sunday 9:00am-10:30am. 

Past attendees have sometimes lamented that there is so much going on during a conference that there is little time for processing and putting insights, emotions and encouragement into motion for the year ahead. Carolyn Wing Greenlee brings her warmth and wisdom to Sunday morning’s session to help attendees re-focus for re-entry. 

Her Sunday workshop is entitled "Capturing the Conference Experience." Carolyn will be recognized this year not only by her poetry opening Saturday’s session and her workshop on Saturday “Emotional Release of Writer’s Block,” but also by her guide dog, Hedy. 

Carolyn’s contribution to the literary world and the Asian experience has deepened our awareness and understanding of the Chinese American history in the west. From her website: “She’s a Third Generation Chinese American from a California Gold Rush/Railroad family. As an insider in this quiet minority, she has spent the last two decades interviewing six generations of family and friends, publishing them in some of her ten books. A retired teacher and Lake County Poet Laureate, Carolyn has edited more than twenty books, a few of which she illustrated. She was a professional photographer for thirty years. 

As a bonus, Carolyn has also written several books about dogs!  Her experience with Chinese healing and its application to writer’s block is part of her Saturday workshop. In addition, on Sunday, she’ll be providing a framework for attendees to relax, consider the time they’ve just spent in community with writer’s and take away renewed energy for their writing life. Saturday 1:25-2:25pm and Sunday 10:45am- noon.

There are still seats on the tour bus for both tours – Friday morning to the award-winning High Desert Museum in Bend and Atelier 6, an art gallery and print shop. The gallery is hosting an exhibit of Edwin Curtis Photographs! Perfect timing for Women Writing the West. A bit of shopping at the Old Mill District along the Deschutes River and lunch on your own then back in time for the conference opener at 2:30pm. $35 with lunch on your own.

Sunday’s tour to the Imperial Stock Ranch has but three openings left. Join us on this tour to the oldest working sheep and cattle ranch in Oregon. We’ll drive through the high desert in the shadow of the Cascades. The buses leave both Friday morning and Sunday morning at 8:30am sharp so plan to be in the lobby by 8:15am. $61 including a box lunch prepared by the Imperial River Company of Maupin.

And if you’re coming in on Thursday, there are also still openings for the three Pre-conference classes. Please visit the website for more information about these fabulous instructors and their willingness to teach classes at what we call “wow” rates.  And don’t forget about our free “Horses 101” presentation Thursday at 4:30pm for the opportunity to learn about horses from an Eagle Crest wrangler at the horse stables.

Don’t forget - September 8 is the cutoff date for guaranteed room rates, conference refunds or meal changes.

 Register now at http://womenwritingthewest.org/

 Also, for those of you interested in donating goods or services to the raffle, please contact Jane Kirkpatrick or Shanna Hatfield. We are accepting donations and grateful for those interested in contributing to the cause! We could also use a few more volunteers. If you are interested in helping at the conference, please let us know.

 If you haven’t yet, like the Women Writing the West 2015 Conference page on Facebook to get the latest conference news. For questions about the conference, contact Jane Kirkpatrick or Shanna Hatfield or visit the website at http://womenwritingthewest.org/

See you in October!

October Conference Tours

By Jane Kirkpatrick

October on the high desert is a gorgeous time of year. Rabbit brush blooms a distinctive yellow, the sage takes on a special hue of green and the sky is as blue as Crater Lake. And the mountains? If all goes well, they might have a dusting of early snow to sparkle white and even pink at sunrise and sunset. The days are warm (often in the high 70s) and the nights cool to sweater and light jacket weather. 

  Redmond, OR is at about 3,400 feet of altitude so plan to drink lots of water that will be provided during the conference. All around the resort are rock gardens, horses on pasture, golf courses that give us green even if we aren’t golfers. (I actually sometimes watch the golf channel just to see the green and listen to soft voices while I’m cleaning and what not. I don’t golf. Yes, strange, I know). 

I digress. We hope you’ll arrive in time to join us for the High Desert Museum Tour. This facility is about 30 minutes from Eagle Crest Resort where the scenery will shift from hardy juniper trees and sage to tall Ponderosa pines and waxy-leafed Manzanita. The architectural- landscape-friendly buildings are nestled among this timbered paradise that serves as a reminder to how it must have looked when settlers first made their way here in the late 1800s.

 The Museum features three interest areas:  the outdoor/wildlife exhibits that include an otter pond that brings adults and kids alike to view this mammal’s life beneath the surface. History and science combine. A period settler house is hosted by passionate docents willing to answer questions. Raptor presentations happen frequently throughout the day both inside the facility and in those great outdoors. Inside there are two wings, one featuring a Native American exhibit with history and artful stories brought to life with video, basketry, and written insights of plateau Indian culture. 

The third interest area includes a living history that allows visitors to walk through time and experience native culture, mining, the impact of the Chinese, logging, cattle and sheep ranching and the challenges of high desert living.  Changing exhibits of art are also a part of this fascinating museum. 

After we leave the Museum, we’ll head for a shorter stop at Atelier 6000, a unique gallery that “emphasizes 21^st-century multimedia approach to contemporary printmaking and book arts while preserving and honoring traditional processes dating back to the 15^th Century. It’s a bibliophile’s dream site! We’ll chat with artists/authors working on unique art books. WWW’s Ellie Waterston will spend a few minutes sharing her experience with her wonderful art book Ví a Láctea written by Ellie, illustrated by Ron Schultz and hand-printed by Atelier 6000 and Lone Goose Press. We’ll learn about the history of art books as well. 

 Then it’s off to the Old Mill District of beautiful Bend. This mall and outdoor museum (of sorts) allows for a river walk along the Deschutes River, provides periodic history of the area including the site once being one of the largest lumber mill operations in the state and how it was reclaimed for this use by one man’s vision of what it could become.  Lunch on your own and we head back to the conference. 

We hope you’ll join us Friday morning. We’re counting on 45 making this choice for Friday morning. This year we also offered a Sunday morning tour. Yes, there will have to be a choice because we’re also providing two terrific workshops for those who do not choose the tour.  But isn’t that what writing is all about, making those choices? We’ll highlight those workshops at a later post.

 

For now, we want you to hear about the tour to the Imperial Stock Ranch, the oldest working sheep and cattle ranch in continuous operation in Oregon. The ranch owners once ran their sheep to the summer pastures along the Deschutes River where members will enjoy their Friday tour lunch and shopping!  The original owners, the Hintons, developed a unique breed of sheep called the Columbia and the sheep had grazing from the Columbia River to what is now the resort community of Sunriver, about 15 miles south of the High Desert Museum.
 

We’ll leave Eagle Crest resort early in the morning (8:30) and head through Smith Rock Park which is a premier rock-climbing center of the country with the Crooked River running through it. We’ll cross the Crooked River and head north toward the ghost town of Shaniko that in the late 1800s was the largest wool shipping center on the west coast. The Imperial Stock Ranch isn’t far from there, in a ravine that opens up to reveal the ranch headquarters. Dan and Jeanne Carver are the second owners not part of the original family. 

The ranch itself is on the National Register of Historic Sites thanks to Jeanne’s passion for history and tradition and the importance of the ranching life. She’ll share that passion as we visit the sheep barns, talk about the cattle operation, hear how they’ve diversified into to lamb-meat production for state-wide restaurants and have a booming yarn business. The latter included providing yarn for Ralph Lauren’s Olympic sweaters last year. There’ll even be a bit of a fashion discussion as the Imperial Stock ranch has a line of designer wool clothing that wowed guests at Portland’s Fashion Week.  A box lunch will energize us for the trip back to the resort and evening flight departures or perhaps more relaxing on the high desert.

We’ve booked a tour bus for 25 people and will need that many to make the trip. I hope you’ll be one of them!

Register now at http://womenwritingthewest.org/