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| What
forms our experience of place? How do our rhythm, our sense of time,
our feeling for beauty, our words emerge from our individual and collective
engagement with the world of our experience? How do these expressions
of our experience shape us and call us to further engagement with
our place? We will explore these questions as we examine our own experience
in a place-- for us, the Pacific Northwest. As we come to see how
the mist over the valley bottoms has been engaged in a dialogue with
the people who live along the banks of the river, we can begin to
see what conversations surround us and what stories await discovery
and voice.
We will study the stories of this place, its natural history, its human history, its
literature and most essentially its poetry. This program is about reading and writing:
about observation and expression. It is also a program about the making of place and the
embeddedness of our lives in particulatiry. We will explore history, legend, natural
history, story and the rich poetic tradition of the Pacific Northwest and will find ways to
attach ourselves to the particular. Through that particular we will think about the
larger world. We will write constantly. We will read our work aloud. We will listen.
And we will publish. We imagine this work as being demanding, deliberate, and a
great deal of pleasure. |
