Book festival to feature poet laureate

“Sisters is graced with one of Oregon’s great independent bookstores,” said author and Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford. “Paulina Springs will bring the experience of books, usually a solitary pleasure, to the wider community. I can’t wait to be part of this festival.”

Stafford will be one of the featured authors at the first Sisters Festival of Books, October 18-20.

Attendees at the festival will have multiple opportunities to hear from Stafford, depending on what tickets they purchase. If having dinner with Stafford and other authors on Saturday night at Paulina Spring Books sounds like fun, Friends of the Festival packages are available for purchase. He will also be presenting during the day on Saturday at Sisters Middle School, for which general admission tickets are available. More information is available, and tickets can be purchased, at http://www.sisters

fob.com/aboutthefestival.

Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, where he has taught writing since 1979. He has also taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, and Bhutan.

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 “A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems.” His more recent works include “100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared,” and “Wind on the Waves: Stories from the Oregon Coast.”

Stafford was named Oregon’s ninth poet laureate by Governor Kate Brown in May 2018, a position his father, William Stafford, also held. He travels the state in his two-year term to share the power of poetry to help communities become more curious about their own stories, more emotionally open, and better prepared to exercise freedom in speech to heal divisions.

He credits his high school English teachers, Mrs. Pittman and Miss Scholastica Murty, as well as his family, and “rivers and forests and students and wise strangers of all kinds,” with getting him started writing and now he “can’t stop.”

Stafford’s own description of who he is goes like this:

“Kim, named by his mother after the Kipling novel she was reading in the hospital where he was born, was later called Kimney Pie as he toddled, and later Buffalo Kim by his father, because of his curly hair, and much later ‘Dr. Stafford’ due to a misguided detour through the hallowed hells of academe, and is now known simply as ‘that guy who teaches writing at the Grad School,’ or ‘that guy who’s always writing in the back corner at Starbucks at 5 a.m.,’ or ‘that guy, you know that guy who gets confused for his father because they both taught at Lewis & Clark like — forever?’

“But secretly, actually, if you want to understand, he’s the kid of about 10 disguised as a professor, the kid who would rather climb a tree than read a book, who’s so bonded to his brother you could hit two birds with one stone, who is down somewhere in that ravine building a tiny fire of hemlock twigs and watching the flame climb through the architecture of his thought….”

Stafford poetically describes a book as being “friendly to the hand in a way the Internet, for all its conveniences, can’t touch. A book has a little door you open to a realm of wonders, then you close it, but the story keeps talking to your mind. You can hand this pleasure to a friend. You can leave a book by your bed as a personal reward for a hard day. You can forget a particular book for years and then be reunited for an affectionate reunion.”