2012 Readings

January 27, 2012 — Elizabeth Austen (poet)

Elizabeth Austen is the author of the poetry collection Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011) and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and Where Currents Meet (one of four winners of the 2010 Toadlily Press chapbook award and part of the quartet Sightline). In 2006 she produced Skin Prayers, an audio CD of her poems. Elizabeth spent her teens and twenties working in the theatre and writing poems. A six-month solo walkabout in the Andes region of South America led her to focus exclusively on poetry. She produces poetry-related programming for KUOW 94.9 and makes her living as a communications specialist at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she also offers retreats and journaling workshops for the staff.

February 24, 2012 — Tim Elhajj (memoir, essays)

Tim Elhajj is the author of Dopefiend: A Father’s Journey from Addiction to Redemption. His nonfiction essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Brevity, Guernica, Sweet, The Yalobusha Review, Together, and Relief. He edits Junk, a journal that features literary memoir about addiction, obsession, and unrequited needs, both real and imagined. His website is http://telhajj.com/.

March 30, 2012 — Bonny Becker (children’s literature)

Bonny Becker is the bestselling author of the Bear and Mouse picture books, including A Visitor for Bear, winner of the E. B. White Read Aloud Award, Amazon’s 2008 Picture Book of the Year, and an Oprah Children’s Book Club selection. Her latest Mouse and Bear book, The Sniffles for Bear, will be released in the fall of 2011. Her most recent middle-grade novel, The Magical Ms. Plum, is a Junior Literary Guild selection and won the 2010 Washington State Children’s Book Award. In all, she’s published 12 books for children. Bonny lives in Seattle with her husband and bounces between Hawaii and New York to visit her two daughters. Her website is www.bonnybecker.com.

April 27, 2012 — Erin Fristad (poet)

Erin Fristad survived fifteen years as a deckhand on commercial fishing and research vessels. She chased herring in Togiak, Alaska; crab off the Columbia River; salmon more places than she can remember; and for five years collected scientific data in Puget Sound. Eventually, the tide brought her to Port Townsend, Washington, where she continues to write, teach, and work as campus director of Goddard College. Erin was a subject in the documentary film, Fisher Poets. Her poems and essays have been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Rosebud, Americas Review, Blue Collar Review, Hanging Loose, Seattle Review, Working the Woods, Word the Sea, New Poets of the American West, and Hooked! True Stories of Obsession, Love and Death from Alaska’s Commercial Fishermen and Women.

May 25, 2012 — Brenda Peterson (novelist, memoirist)

Brenda Peterson is the author of seventeen books, which range from her first popular memoir, Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals, chosen as a “Best Spiritual Book of the Year,” to three novels, one of which, Duck and Cover, was selected by The New York Times as a “Notable Book of the Year.” Her new memoir, I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth, was chosen as an Indie Next “Best Top Read” and among the “Top Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of 2010.” Critically acclaimed, I Want to Be Left Behind was hailed by Booklist as “unusually affecting and radiant . . . a witty, enrapturing account of a spiritual journey of great relevance to us all.” Brenda’s first children’s book, Leopard and Silkie: One Boy’s Quest to Save Seal Pups, is due out in April 2012. Take a look at www.amazon.com/Leopard-Silkie-Boys-Quest-Save/dp/080509167X. For more audio/video and back-story on Brenda’s new memoir, please visit www.IWantToBeLeftBehind.com.

June 29, 2012 — Kim Kircher (nonfiction)

Kim Kircher has logged more than 600 hours of explosives control, earning not only her avalanche blaster’s card, but also a heli-blaster endorsement, allowing her to fly over ski slopes in a helicopter and drop bombs from the open cockpit, while uttering the fabulously thrilling words “bombs away.” Her articles have appeared in The Ski Journal, Women’s Adventure Magazine, and Off-Piste Magazine. Her memoir, The Next 15 Minutes: Strength From the Top of the Mountain, portrays her life as a ski patroller and the lessons she learned on the slopes in order to get through her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Read more about Kim and her book on her website at kimkircher.com.

July 27, 2012 — Mary Eliza Crane (poet)

Mary Eliza Crane grew up in New England and began writing poetry at age fourteen. Poetry remains the one constant in life to which Mary always returns. In the Adirondacks she fell madly, passionately, and desirously in love with the natural world. A transplant to the Cascade foothills of the Pacific Northwest, her voice lives in the understory and fog of the Snoqualmie River. With this one true love and a deep understanding of what makes us human, she fuses the personal, political, and natural world. A regular feature at poetry venues in the Puget Sound region, she has two volumes of poetry, What I Can Hold In My Hands and At First Light, published by Gazoobi Tales.

August 4, 2012 — 15th Anniversary Party!

We extended a warm welcome to folks, family and friends attending RASP’s 15th Birthday Celebration. We all brought food to share. There was a Limerick Competition, on-site, with performance submission. And we ate birthday cake with impunity! It was all at Redmond’s Anderson Park, where the trees have socks over their bark, from 6:00 p.m. ’til dark.

August 24, 2012 —Jack Straw Writers:
Stacey Bennetts, Gabriela Denise Frank, and Nicholas Wong (memoir, nonfiction)

Stacey Bennetts is a mother, a writer, and a criminal defense attorney, in Seattle, Washington. She married her Hastings College of the Law classmate—and landlord during her house arrest stint—Dennis Carroll. Stacey is editing her 330-page unpublished memoir, Trial By Error: Confessions of an Eight-Year-Old Drug Smuggler, while a student of the 2012 EDGE Professional Development Program for Writers and the Jack Straw Program.

Gabriela Denise Frank, a Detroit native and Seattle resident, is the author of CivitaVeritas: An Italian Fellowship Journey, published in 2011. The book is based on her experience in the unique Italian hill town of Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy, where she lived as a fellow of the Northwest Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in Italy. Gabriela holds a BA in English from the University of Arizona and an Associate of Applied Arts with honors in graphic design from the Art Institute of Seattle. In 2010, she launched a blog, www.hiddencitydiaries.com, which she continues to write today.

Nick Wong is a writer and photographer who explores culture through the art of boxing. A Mary Gates Scholar, a Bonderman Fellow, and a VONA alum, he served as the assistant editor at the International Examiner from 2009 to 2010 and now freelances for online boxing websites. He is currently writing his first book about his journey through the boxing gyms of Latin America (www.thewanderingpugilist.com) and working towards his dream of building boxing gyms around the world.

September 28, 2012 — Michael Dylan Welch (poet)

Michael Dylan Welch has published thousands of his poems, reviews, and essays in hundreds of journals and anthologies in at least fifteen languages. He has won and judged numerous contests, and has published dozens of books, including four translations from Japanese. Michael is currently vice president of the Haiku Society of America, a board member of the Washington Poets Association, curator for the SoulFood Poetry Night, and founder/perpetrator of National Haiku Writing Month, which reached more than a quarter million people in its second year (2012). He was founder and first president of the Tanka Society of America, cofounded the Haiku North America conference and the American Haiku Archives, is a former Jack Straw writer, and also translated a poem that appeared on the back of 150,000,000 U.S. postage stamps in March of 2012. Michael lives in Sammamish, Washington. His website, devoted chiefly to poetry, especially haiku, is www.graceguts.com.

October 26, 2012 — Bill Yake (poet)

Bill Yake is a poet and retired environmental scientist. For years he directed investigations into the toxic contamination of water, fish, and sediment for the Washington State Department of Ecology. He has two collections of poetry: This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain (2003) and Unfurl, Kite, and Veer (2010), both from Radiolarian Press in Astoria, Oregon, plus several chapbooks, most recently The Islands at the Edge of the World (2012, Scatter Creek Press). His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies serving the environmental and literary communities, including Wilderness Magazine, Anthropology and Humanism, Open Spaces Quarterly, Fine Madness, Rattle, and ISLE-Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He has served on the board of the Olympia Poetry Network for more than fifteen years and lives with his wife, Jeannette, on the verge of a ravine carved by a small chum creek feeding the southern Salish Sea.

November 30, 2012 —Bill Hayes (poet)

Bill Hayes (aka “Billy” or “Wild Bill”) struggled as a youth with asthma, synesthesia, ADHD, a broken back, fractured skull, and an attitude that got him tossed from high school. Joining the military, he felt his wife’s fury from half a world away when he neglected to inform her about being wounded. Leaving the military, Bill survived a serious helicopter crash in Alaska, and once again felt his wife’s righteous anger when a bill for ambulance service was inadvertently mailed to their home near Seattle. Bill’s passion in life (besides that for his ever-forgiving wife, half-a-dozen children, and eight talented grand-daughters) is writing. Bill has completed a hundred-thousand-word novel about a young woman’s struggle to compete against boys in high school sports, a collection of outrageous verse about food and dieting, called Bite Me, writes wild limericks, and was a short story finalist in the annual Pacific Northwest Writers Association contest.

December 7, 2012 — Holiday Party

Be sure to see the photos!

It’s that wonderful time of year again—

• When sugar plum fairies play ice hockey with wee little Jack Frosties.

• When snowmen chortle gleefully as ribbons wave of red, gold and green.

• When steaming mugs of elf-nog warm our stocking-covered hands.

• When Rasputians roundly toast each other with seasonal poetry.

Never mind the weather, hitch old Maude to the sleigh—

• If it snows, we’ll be warm. If it rains, we’ll be dry.

• If it’s crispy or nippy or noggy, we’ll be happy as clams in a rug.

• Bring friends and your family; bring people and strangers galore.

• The room is quite large, the emcee’s in charge. The food will fill out your derriere!

December 28, 2012 — Barbara Stoner

Barbara Stoner has been writing for most of her life, if you count letters and journal entries, a short story here, an article there. She earned a magna cum laude degree in the humanities from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay and has worked at everything from tractor driver to secretary. A few years ago, she decided it was time to stop getting the experience and start doing the art. Her novel The Year of the Crow is based on her earlier years in Wisconsin and her love of wild places, the Grateful Dead, and magic, as well as both hopes and fears for the future. She has two children of whom she is wildly proud. Barbara has lived in Seattle for more than 25 years and is currently working on another novel based on other times, other loves. Her website is www.barbarasbookhouse.com/node.