— Jan 2, 06:01 PM — 

PNCA Welcomes Writer-in-Residence Kim Stafford

Author and teacher will facilitate the exploration of writing within the PNCA community

Kim Stafford, an esteemed Oregon-based writer, educator and recipient of Literary Arts’ Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, has joined PNCA as its first Writer-in-Residence. The appointment comes after an ongoing discussion within the PNCA community on the role writing plays in art making.

“Kim Stafford brings the elements of whole-minded creativity to our evolving understanding and practice of the visual arts here at PNCA,” said PNCA president Tom Manley. “The writer Daniel Pink has explained that there are certain indispensable aspects of this type of creativity: design, story, symphony, play and empathy and meaning — and if you read Kim’s work or work with Kim in a workshop or conversation, you will find that he enriches the supply of each of these ingredients. His is a creative technology that generates far more energy than it uses.”

As part of his work within the PNCA community, Stafford is facilitating exploratory writing practices with students, faculty and staff in an effort to “welcome young ideas” early into the process of art creation. He also offers individual consultations and others forms of engagement with the creative life of the school. Recently, he collaborated with visiting writer Barry Sanders on a workshop incorporating Sanders’s essay on the Iraq war’s devastating impact on the environment.

“Through conversations with students, faculty, and staff, I hope to develop ways that the practice of writing can befriend the creative life,” said Stafford. “My vision here is to be a companion to students, faculty, alumni, events, stories, silences, enigmas, moments of luck and consternation, and other dimensions of the city of art.”

Having worked as an oral historian, editor, writer, photographer, letterpress printer and writing teacher, Stafford is a fixture on the northwest’s literary landscape. Literary Arts recently honored him with the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for his many contributions including his publications of poetry, essays and stories as well as his work as co-founder of both the Oregon Folk Arts program and the Fishtrap Writers’ Gathering in Wallowa County. In 1996, he founded the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College, where he taught for 28 years. He serves as the Literary Executor for the William Stafford Archive, helping readers and publishers to increase public access to his late father William Stafford’s writing. He hopes to one day open the William Stafford Studio, a civic resource around the practice of writing.

Describing himself as “a seeker” or “professional eavesdropper,” Stafford is largely interested in the collective voice rather than his own musings about writing. “When I work best, I interview a class—it’s that potlatch version of teaching and sharing,” he said. “I want to foster a true democracy of creation.”

Stafford has written a dozen publications of poetry and prose, including: A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1999); Having Everything Right: Essays of Place (rpt. Sasquatch Books, 1996); and We Got Here Together (a children’s book, Harcourt Brace, 1994).

He received two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his book Having Everything Right won a Western States Book Award in 1986. He received an Oregon Governor’s Arts Award in 1998 and holds a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the University of Oregon. Stafford lives in Portland with his wife and children, where he is currently working on a new CD of songs, a collection of poems in wartime and a novel.

Read more about Kim Stafford

Podcast: Interview with Kim Stafford and President Manley

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