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About the Mt. Shasta Writers Series
A Sampling of Mt Shasta Writers Series Events
The Mount Shasta Writers Series is a sponsored program of the Siskiyou Arts Council, directed by a volunteer board of directors, and supported by area business and individuals in
collaboration with the Poets and Writers' California Readings/Workshops Program and the Shasta Regional Community Foundation.
Click to visit the Mt Shasta Writers Series website.
Jerry Martien & Clemens Starck
Jerry and Clem have been involved in the Mt. Shasta Writers Series programs since its inception in 2003.
Winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry and the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award, Clemens Starck's work is about things he's actually done. Starck has written Journeyman's Wages and China Basin.
Jerry Martien, a community activist, professor at Humboldt State University, carpenter and poet has written a collection of poetry, Pieces in Place.
"Lyrics, philosophy, regional politics, ecstatic understated invocations! Finding where we stand. All with a sardonic but compassionate eye. I am deeply pleased that the poetry of Jerry Martien - I have admired it for years - is now available." Gary Snyder"I'm not alone in particularly cherishing poems by people who work with their hands. Carpenters, printers and factory workers are a fresh and vital antidote to the myriad of academic poets. Cheers for Clem!" Carolyn Kizer
Linda Hussa & Charles Goodrich
Charles Goodrich is the author of the poetry collection The Insects of South Corvalis and the essay collection The Practice of Home. His work has appeared in the magazines Orion and The Sun. A number of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on the NPR program, "The Writer's Almanac." For twenty-five years Goodrich worked as a professional gardener. He is presently an instructor for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word at Oregon State University, a program that brings together creative writers, philosophers and environmental scientists. 
"His seemingly casual poems have the artful simplicity of Japanese flower arrangement. Each one is a little object to behold and ponder. Basho would have liked them." Clem Starck
Writer and rancher in the Great Basin, Linda Hussa has three poetry collections and three books of non-fiction. The themes of her work are drawn from the isolated nature of ranching and her commitment to the health of rural communities. Blood Sister, I Am to These Fields, her latest collection of poetry was the winner of three national awards in 2002: including The Spur award given by the Western Writers of America and the Willa given by Women Writing the West. She is the recipient of the 1999 Nevada Writers' Silver Pen Award.
"Blood Sister, I Am to These Fields assures us that blood is not blood is not necessarily thicker than water, that the earth is, in fact, our own flesh and blood. Linda Hussa, like Julia `Butterfly' Hill, writes from a high vantage point - the cowboy west is her Luna." Paul Zarzysk
Paul Hunter
Paul Hunter's most recent collection is Breaking Ground. Paul has made his living has poet, teacher, musician, instrument-maker, artist, editor and publisher. For the last nine years he has produced beautiful letterpress books under the imprint of Wood Works. 
"Breaking Ground is the finest poetic treatment of farming and farmers I have read...When Paul Hunter describes a brilliant midnight from the open door of an outhouse, the scene is drawn beautifully from undeniable recollection." David Lee Jim Dodge
Author of "Fup" and "Rain on the River, Selected Poems and Prose"
Jim Dodge is internationally known for his fiction, including the now infamous Fup. However, Dodge's first and abiding passion is his poetry, which he has been publishing anonymously and in small chapbooks since the late sixties. In 2002 Rain on the River, Selected Poems and Prose was released. Jim Dodge is a professor at Humboldt State University and lives in the Klamath Mountains. "Contains lyric epigrams that go straight to the non-dualist bedrock, backwoods workers' dharma-combat humor, loving poems for wife and son, several high-spirited and near-transcendent poems of truth, sex and insight..." Gary Snyder
Brian Turner & Tony Barnstone
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and the New York Times "Editor's Choice" selection. Turner served seven years in the US Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. Turner's poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology, published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name.Tony Barnstone is Professor of English at Whittier College and has published his poetry, fiction, essays and translations in dozens of major American journals. His books include Sad Jazz: Sonnets, Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, and Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry.
"The relationship Turner establishes with the reader is not dialogue but a tidal insistence on reflection, that if there is meaning in loss, there must be meaning in what precedes loss, in what is related to loss." -The Franklin Journal
Siskiyou County residents enjoyed a reading by Pam Houston www.pamhouston.net - author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction.
Susan WoolridgeOn September 27th, 2007, poet Susan Woolridge appeared at the Stage Door Cabaret in Mt. Shasta. Susan Woolridge is the author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words (in a 20th printing from Three Rivers, Random House) and a new book Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing (and freeing your creative process). (Harmony Books, Random House, 2007.) Poemcrazy was a long-running Quality Paperback Book Club Selection and Foolgold is now featured in One Spirit catalog.
Susan also has a chapbook of poems, Bathing with Ants (Bear Star Press). She conducts workshops on writing and creativity throughout the U.S. She has two grown children and lives in a co-housing village in Chico, California and sometimes on a houseboat in Sausalito.
Susan is now completing a book on writing and collage.