nwi.html

Some writing by Kim Stafford

My work at the Northwest Writing Institute includes writing for multiple audiences, and in multiple forms. The Northwest Writing Institute is a learning and teaching community within the Graduate School at Lewis & Clark College where we engage in writing together to deepen our thinking and extend our understanding. To sample this work, by scrolling down you will find the following:

1. Three passages by Kim Stafford -- little manifestoes originally published in the Northwest Writing Institute newsletter

2. Some workshops available from Kim Stafford, with many elements deriving from my learning within the teaching community of the Northwest Writing Institute

3. "The Lucky Ones," a song I composed for a gathering at Headwaters, in Ashland, Oregon

1. Three passages by Kim Stafford, as published in the Northwest Writing Institute newsletter, and now formatted for recording and submission to National Public Radio....

OREGON SONG-WRITER KIM STAFFORD DID AN OLD FASHIONED THING THE OTHER DAY &endash; AFTER GIVING A LECTURE AT THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE, HE PICKED UP A COUPLE OF YOUNG HITCHHIKERS, AND FOUND HIMSELF REMEMBERING THE GOOD OLD DAYS….

On a hot afternoon I pulled into the parking lot at a local college, fully prepared to give my folk song lecture. My sweaty fist held my guitar, and I found my way to a windowless room with desks bolted to the floor and chemical equations on the walls. The room filled with students, the teacher introduced me, and we began.

I told stories and sang songs, asked questions, gave a little sermon about the treasures of memory, and finally found myself quoting from an old-time folksinger, Rosalie Sorrels.

"Rosalie tells," I said, "how we stopped singing to each other so often or so easily sometime in the late 1970s. And about the same time, she says, we stopped picking up hitchhikers. It wasn't safe emotionally to sing, and it wasn't safe physically to share our rides and our lives.

"Id like to sing a song from that time," I said, "about the hitchhiker I picked up in the spring of 1979. He had bandages on both hands, and he told me this story...

It ain't all honey and roses, down in Portland,
When you got no work and hungry children:

Driving along down Burnside in the evening,

Looking for a sign....

As I sang, I saw several students in the front row close their eyes and take the story deep. After the song, the students filed out, I took my guitar, found the parking lot, and started down the road that led from campus to the world. It was evening rush hour, and in our cars we were all packed in tight at fifty-five miles an hour. And then up ahead, as if from another time, I saw two young women standing by the road, their long hair blowing in the wind, hitchhiking, and I pulled over to give them a ride. One slid in to the passenger seat beside me, and the other climbed in back. And before they had even closed their doors, the one in back cried out, "Ooh, mister! Is this your guitar? Do you just, like, travel around, singing? My dad says everyone used to do like that. If you took a guitar, he says, you could always get a ride."

"Yeah," I said, "that's my guitar. How far are you girls going?"

In reply, I heard from the woman beside me a sentence I had not heard in many a year.

"How far are you going?" she said.

And then I remembered how it was in the good old days. You would figure, "Maybe this guy's going to a more interesting place than I was...why not go along and find out?"

"I'm going where you're going," I said, "because I'd better take you there. It's really not safe to hitchhike these days, you know."

"Oh," said the one in back, "we're going to the mall."

So we drove the freeway to the mall, talking about old times, about songs they had heard, or heard the names of. At the curb there, I made them promise to take the bus home, and they jumped out, laughing and waving as they disappeared into the crowd.

By then, it was getting dark. I drove home, humming to myself. And when I entered my dark house, I didn't feel like turning on the lights. I just wanted to take my guitar out on the back porch, sit on my old blue chair, listen to the sleepy songs of the birds, and sing to myself. In the dim light I thought as how maybe we'd come to a time again when we could sit together in a meadow, look each other in the eye, and sing.

WHEN OREGON WRITER KIM STAFFORD VISITS THE LITTLE TOWNS OF HIS REGION, HE GETS A NEW IDEA WHAT PATRIOTISM COULD REALLY BE….

What does it mean to have talent? What does it mean to be proud? We are taught to act smart and independent in our lives, and to boast our nation's strength. But when I live my own days, visiting the little towns I love, I know all pleasure lies in weakness, not in power. Our survival as a species depends on softness of a winsome kind. Without helpless devotion, we are lost, but by our weakness, we pledge true allegiance, and find our work. In my own life, I recognize this principle with the following manifesto to my friends in the Oregon country--not the political empire, but this glorious, injured, treasured state of being:

My friends, on this earth together now, I have to tell you

I have a weakness for little towns, especially in the early morning

when the first gold light touches sidewalk and storefront in Scio,

Molalla, Gray's River and Nehalem, Arcata and Imnaha, Ione and Helix,

and along Klickitat Street in northeast Portland where the heron flies over.

In some dusky trailer on the mountain, where the family placed her,

I have a weakness for an old woman trying to tell me her secrets

simply because I am younger, and I am leaning forward,

listening. I have a weakness for the local sentiments written,

carved, beaded, branded, painted, and stitched on the ceiling

of the Wishram Tavern, for the world's largest rosary collection

in--where is it--Stevenson? I have a weakness for the youngest

dancer in the arena of dust at Warm Springs, and the oldest

tree holding green along the bushwhack path of the Collowash.

I have a weakness for those restless beads of water shaken by wind

on the blue camas spires at Catherine Creek . Inside a little school,

on a February day lit only by rain and a teacher's face, I have a weakness

for a young boy or girl who falls silent in the middle of the lesson--not

because the answer is beyond her reach, or beyond his grasp, but because

the question recalls the huge complexity of the world.

When the news

is dark, and my own spirit falters, I feel weak and afraid. There is much

against us, arrayed in numbers and predictions, in agendas and imperatives,

hard stories and sad endings. But then it's morning, and I have a weakness

for mornings, for my wife, my daughter, the tribe of our friends, and

I have a weakness for that impossible, inevitable work -- the quiet patriotism

I don't yet know is mine.

OREGON WRITER WILLIAM STAFFORD DIED IN AUGUST OF 1993. ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS FATHER'S DEATH, WRITER KIM STAFFORD CARRIES HIS OWN YOUNG SON INTO THE FOREST, AND WONDERS WHAT HIS FATHER'S POEMS WERE REALLY ALL ABOUT…

Every morning now I walk a forest path with our young son on my back. As we walk, little Guthrie deafens me with his long-winded crooning. He takes a breath, and then he sings and sings. But as he pauses to take another breath, I hear far down the canyon the winter wren with its own endless trill like water without any reason ever to stop, pouring and scattering through the green of Oregon, a boundless generosity flowing quietly through us. Then it's Guthrie's turn again. I trudge, and tremble, shaken by his glorious voice.

Forty years ago, by a campfire in the Three Sisters Wilderness, we were all telling stories, and one came to my father's mind he later made into a poem, and then into a children's book: The Animal That Drank Up Sound. In that story, a hungry creature swallows all the sounds of the world into itself, and when our world has grown completely silent, that animal begins to starve. The world itself then starves for sound. Who can save us from that deep silence? In the end, it is a lowly cricket who chirps and brings back the world of sound.

That story came from a night by the campfire, but I think it also came from the deafening darkness of World War II, when my father was a pacifist. War was the animal that drank the quiet from the world &endash; for after the War, after the Bomb fell, the little voices of the land and of local human life seemed trivial, somehow beside the point. The voices of children -- what could they say in a world so wrenched awry? Stories from a home town isolated on my father's Kansas plains -- what could such a small place offer? And yet -- like the cricket in his own story, my father tried. He kept writing his quiet poems about the clarities of childhood, the internal calm that makes affection possible, the yielding to human variety that invites a stranger to be kin. He kept saying his easy little arias over and over -- like the wren, like our boy Guthrie.

I know many have been silenced -- by death, by intimidation, by the loud claims of trauma and injustice. We live in a world where it sometimes feels like that old Twilight Zone episode: as if by magic we can read the loud thoughts of others all around us, but their buzzing thoughts are so loud, we can't hear our own most quiet inner voice. The animal that drank sound from our lives -- is it wealth? Is it a cause so important there is no time to dream? Is it a demanding job, daily obligations without rest? In the presence of such a busy world, what can be your own quiet song?

So, Guthrie and I go out into the forest, walk the long aisle of green. I feel we were spirits already, the leaves and their light penetrating the soft shells of our bodies. And the wren calls, and Guthrie speaks an endless word.

What is better than to try, like a cricket or a wren, to be a human being?

2. Some workshops by Kim Stafford:

For information about workshop formats and daily rates, contact Kim Stafford at the Northwest Writing Institute / Lewis & Clark College, Box 100 / 0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd. / Portland, Oregon 97219 (503-768-7745 / fax -7747)

Miracles of St. Solitude

A host of writing invitations for use in the private writing studio, or in the classroom.

Writing from Local Knowledge

Writing within the honeycomb of local topics: teachers, friends, speaking places, dreams, personal myths, and other fountains of plenty.

Quilting Your Solitudes

A specific approach to writing works of any length during sequential solitudes of any brevity, by adapting the genre you write for the writing time you have.

Having Everything Right: the Essay of Place as Moral Action

Writing the essay that gathers questions, stories, lyric outbursts, and other utterance that speak for particular places.

Story as Your Second Language

Moving beyond our first language of sensation -- apprehending the world by the light, texture, and ringing voice of all things visible -- we enter our second language, reading by the light we begin to shine on invisible things: ideas, recollections, stories.

The Writer and Teacher as Professional Eavesdropper

Writing from the sense that the muses are all around us, and our job as writers is simply to take dictation on the world, to be "scribe to the prophet."

Starting with Little Things

Some intersections with the poetry of William Stafford -- through writing and conversation.

3. "The Lucky Ones"

A song composed and performed for Headwaters, at a gathering to envision the saving of the Klamath-Siskiyou Bioregion, Ashland, Oregon...

What if you were small and no one knew your name

and you lived in a hollow in the hills?

What if no one noticed whether you were here or gone, at night as the world grew still?

chorus:
Maybe you would be among the lucky ones,

Pure in how you go.

Maybe you would know the quiet of the land

that seems as if it happened long ago.

How would it be to be the last of your kind, lonesome for the many you once knew?

How would it be to see a million stars, and know your nights are few?

chorus:
Maybe you would be among the lucky ones,

Pure in how you go.

Maybe you would know the quiet of the land

that seems as if it happened long ago.

What if you were few, scattered like the dew that gathers by dark on the ground?

What if every soul made a song of what it knew, and passed it round and round?

chorus:
Then you would be among the lucky ones,

Pure in how you go.

Then you would be the quiet of the land

that seems as if it happened long ago.