Festival Recap
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 2008 ROCKY MOUNTAIN WRITERS' FESTIVAL
The 18th annual Rocky Mountain Writers' Festival was held the week of April 7 – April 12, 2008.
The venues included: Idaho State University, The College Market, Main Street Coffee & News, The Warehouse, and The Portneuf Valley Brewery.
On Monday, award winning author (and former Soda Springs resident)
Brandon R. Schrand kicked off the festival at Idaho State Univeristy. Brandon read from his memoir The Enders Hotel (U. Nebraska Press, 2008),
where he grew up under its leaking roof and where he watched a cast of broken characters
pass through the hotel doors, trying to find his own identity among those revolving faces.
Haunted by a father he had never seen, he tested the faces of those drifters for familiarity.
This reading was sponsored by the Pocatello Arts Council.
Tuesday's reading was held at The College Market. Readers: Erin Gray, Karen Homstad, Joan Juskie, Joshua Mayes, Eli McCormick, and Jeff Pearson.
On Wednesday Ofelia Zepeda offered up both an afternoon colloquium and an evening reading at Idaho State University. Thanks to Ronald Snake Edmo for hosting and helping to organize the event.
Thursday's reading was held at Main Street Coffee. Readers: Leslie Leek, Patricia Murphy, Will Peterson, Susan Swetnam, and Marty Vest.
On Friday, author Paisley Rekdal
presented a lecture on the lyric imagination in photography and poetry, in particular by looking at portraits of
Native Americans around the turn of the century. She explored what photos and lyric poems propose to do
when they create portraits of people. Paisley is the author of a book of essays and three books of poetry. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, the University of Georgia Press' Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, several Pushcart Prize nominations.
Later that evening she was joined by Ely Shipley, author of Boy with Flowers (Barrow Street, 2008), for a reading at the Portneuf Valley Brewing Company.
This reading was sponsored by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council.
Saturday featured a day-long event complete with book fair, potluck, and a reading at The Warehouse. Readers: Rick Ardinger, Michael Corrigan, Andra Hansen, Anne Merkely, Ray Obermayr, Cathy Peppers, Gino Sky, and William Studebaker
Updated 01/19/09