2024 PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES, RAYMOND CARVER WRITING FESTIVAL
Robert "Bob" Brajcich
Bob Brajcich is the current mayor of Clatskanie. Clatskanie is governed by a Mayor and six-member council elected by the people. The population of Clatskanie, Oregon is 1,774 (2023).
Nancy Cook
Nancy Cook taught creative writing, literature, and film at Astoria’s Clatsop Community College for 18 years. She has also led dozens of wilderness writing workshops through Alaska’s nonprofit Wrangell Mountains Center and Prince William Sound College. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2004.
Craig Florence
Craig Florence is the proprietor of Mother Foucault's Bookshop. Located on the border of Portland’s inner southeast industrial district, Mother Foucault’s specializes in used, rare, and vintage books. Stop in and browse their wide and eclectic selection of philosophy, foreign language, arts, fiction, and poetry titles.
Joseph Green
Joseph Green lives in Longview, Washington, where he retired in 2010 after teaching for twenty-five years at Lower Columbia College. He serves on the board of directors for the C.C. Stern Type Foundry and Museum of Metal Typography in Clatskanie. His most recent poetry collection is What Water Does at a Time Like This (MoonPath Press, 2015).
Deborah Hazen
Deborah Steele Hazen was the third generation of her family to own, edit, and report for The Clatskanie Chief newspaper, where she spent most of her 50-plus years as a journalist. She interviewed Raymond Carver in 1984. Deborah sold The Chief in 1984, but continues as a freelance writer. Several of her poems have been set to music and performed by her musical partner Clark Mallory. Deborah and her husband Phil are the parents of adult triplets, and have eight grandchildren. She is president of the Clatskanie Foundation, co-manager of the Clatskanie Cultural Center, president of the Clatskanie Historical Society and host of The Castle.
Maryanne Hirning
Maryanne Hirning received her MLIS from the University of Washington in 2018. Before becoming the Executive Director of the Clatskanie Library District in 2021, she worked as both an academic librarian and a public school librarian. Maryanne is passionate about the educational services and resources libraries provide!
Asher Finch
Asher Finch (they/he) is a student at Clatsop Community College and Editor-in-Chief of CCC’s in-house literary publication, Rain Magazine. They are currently preparing for the journey of a BFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University, with the aspiring goal of becoming a writing instructor. Asher is published in Rain and has other work out on submission. Their time away from class is often spent in his local bookstore, though Asher can be echo-located by following the sound of their laughter.
Vicki (Vee) Lind
Vicki (Vee) Lind writes about her search for love of herself and love from men on the backdrop of the free love sixties in Haight Ashbury. Vicki has a Masters in Counseling from U of Oregon and brings her skills as an ADHD/Procrastination Coach to this workshop She lives in Astoria where she divides her time between coaching, writing, and decoding the messages of the barking Sea Lions.
Scott MacGregor
Scott lives in Clatskanie, Oregon and is a Jamestown S’Klallam member, farmer, and a part of the Skipper Jamestown Canoe family. He is also an indigenous drummer and storyteller. Scott is the author of Hookey Walker, illustrated by Tracy Prescott MacGregor.
Michael Mills
Michael Calvin Mills is a writer of short stories, essays, and plays. His work has appeared in Short-Form Creative Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury, Youth Culture and Social Change: Making a Difference by Making a Noise from Palgrave MacMillan, Short Story, Weird Tales, The Caribbean Writer, Tales from the South, and other publications. He has been awarded several prizes, including a Meritorious Achievement Award in Playwriting from the Kennedy Center ACTF for Freak Like Me:The Musical, and was the runner up for the Sarabande Book Award in 2016. He teaches at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, where he is host of the Raymond Carver Podcast. Mills grew up behind the Redwood Curtain in Eureka, California, and lived for a decade in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he survived an F-3 tornado.
Marianne Monson
Marianne Monson is a women's history author who writes nonfiction, historical fiction, and poetry. She's the author of twelve books, founder of The Writers Guild (a literary nonprofit) and co-host of KMUN's River Writers.
Laura Moulton
Laura Moulton is the author of Loaners: The Making of a Street Library (a co-written book about founding of the Street Books bike library in Portland). You can find her writing at Truth & Dare (https://truthanddare.substack.com) and follow her projects at https://lauramoulton.org.
Ben Parzybok
Benjamin Parzybok is a novelist living in Portland, Oregon. He has published two books: Couch and Sherwood Nation. Ben is the creator of Gumball Poetry, a journal published through gumball machines, the Psychic Book Project and the Black Magic Insurance Agency, a citywide mystery/treasure hunt. His projects have twice been selected as Best of Portland for the Willamette Week: "Best Guy Who Walks His Talk" and "Best Quarter's Worth of Culture."
Robert Michael Pyle
Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle has been studying natural history and writing essay, poetry, and fiction along a tributary of the Lower Columbia for forty-five years. His 28 books include the Northwest classics Wintergreen and Sky Time in Gray's River, Where Bigfoot Walks, the novel Magdalena Mountain, and a flight of butterfly books. The latest of his four poetry collections, The Last Man in Willapa, has just been published. A John Burroughs Medalist, Guggenheim Fellow, and PEN America Art of the Essay finalist, Bob may be heard at Ric's Poetry Mic in Astoria and on streaming platforms for his album Butterfly Launches from Spar Pole with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic. He was lucky to have known Ray Carver from the time of their mutual receipt of Washington Governor's Book Awards in the nineteen-eighties.
Ed Skoog
Ed Skoog has published four books of poems, most recently Travelers Leaving for the City (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland.
Kim Stafford
Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term.
Mac Stripling
Mac Stripling was born and raised in Clatskanie, Oregon. As a small child, his favorite president was Herbert Hoover. Since graduating, he has worked a myriad of minimum wage jobs (gas stations, restaurants, etc.) He spends his free time listening to Dinosaur Jr, and hanging out with his girlfriend. He hopes to one day open a tourist trap on the coast, where he will sell seashells for 5$ a pop, and tell the children what it was like in, "The roarin' twenties." Also, it should be noted, he has never understood all the hype around Henry Miller.
Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor is the author of four books of fiction, most recently Reboot, a novel, published in April by Pantheon Books. He is also the author of a memoir, Riding with the Ghost (Random House, 2020). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Oxford American, and The Sewanee Review. He lives in Portland.
Chad Wriglesworth
Chad Wriglesworth grew up in Oregon and is finishing a book titled Geographies of Reclamation: Literature, Art, and Spirituality in the Columbia River Basin. The project traces ways that literary and visual art about the watershed have shaped cultural attitudes, spiritual practices, and environmental policies in the Pacific Northwest for more than 150 years. Chad currently lives in Ontario, Canada (with his family and dog, “Carver”), where he is Associate Professor of English at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. Over the years, he has published essays on Raymond Carver in venues such as Western American Literature, Religion and the Arts, New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays on His Life, Poetry, and Fiction, and Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. He is also an Associate Editor for The Raymond Carver Review, an open-access journal of literary criticism that is devoted to exploring the life and work of the author from a wide range of international perspectives.