Always Coming Home with Poetry
In her book Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin explored our possible future by making up a human world more deserving of the blessings of earth. How would we inhabit a place without violation or theft? How would we sustain one another? How would we honor all our relations? In this workshop, we will savor poems by Le Guin, and learn from them by writing poems in response. The idea is to take a hard and loving look at an Ursula poem, ask what we learned as writers and as Earth citizens from that poem, then writing “in conversation with Ursula” poems in response.
Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute, and co-founder of Fishtrap. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Having Everything Right: Essays of Place in 1986, and the new poetry collection, Wild Honey, Tough Salt: Poems, in 2019. He has taught writing in schools, colleges, meadows, forests, and in Assisi, Glasgow, and a remote village in Bhutan. In May 2018 Gov. Kate Brown appointed him as Oregon’s ninth Poet Laureate.