WEEK TWO: August 8th through 14th

"Refuge" Writing Workshop with Ann Staley
"Refuge" Writing Workshop
"We are gardeners, all of us, our hands broadcasting seed in the spring, our arms in autumn clutching the harvested wheat. We mingle and retreat, seek company and refuge," writes Barbara Hurd in her essay "Refugium." This essay will be a central text in the writing workshop, and along with other essays and poems, will prompt us toward our own understandings of how refuge is vital to human well-being. That we take refuge in each other in places that feel safe, in glimpses of the living-breathing world - these are the three paths we will meander as we journey with our notebooks and each other.

Ann has been a teacher and writer all her life. She began in the basement, the summer after she had Mrs. Winifred Kitchen as her 2nd grade teacher. Ann has taught, primarily, high school literature and writing in 6 public school districts in Pennsylvania and Oregon, but also apprentice teachers, librarians, professors, counselors in training, and, once, 2nd grade children learning to speak English. She migrated to the west coast in her VW bug, "Moon Shadow," at the close of the 1960's and loves the Willamette Valley for the ways it seems to mirror the Pennsylvania where she grew up. Ann lives with her husband, Courtney, cat, Dexter, her books, and with poems and essays in-progress. She is at least as old as you are.