Wine on the Waterfront in Port Angeles

Coming right up, the next reading on Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at Wine on the Waterfront in Port Angeles:

PRESS RELEASE:  North Coast Writers reading, featuring Judith Kitchen

WHEN: Tuesday, March 4, 2014; 7:00 p. m.

On Tuesday, March 4, Port Townsend author Judith Kitchen will share segments from two of her recent books with her audience. In The Circus Train,  a novella-length essay, Kitchen focuses on memory and mortality. She will also read from Half in Shade, tellingly subtitled, “Family, Photograph and Fate” (Coffee House Press), another “genre-bending” work.     

This free reading, sponsored by North Coast Writers, takes place at Wine on the Waterfront, 115 East Railroad Avenue, in Port Angeles at 7 p. m.  The public is welcome and encouraged to arrive early for purchase of refreshments, to avoid disrupting the reading.

The prolific Kitchen is also the author of a novel, a book of poetry, a book length study of William Stafford, and three collections of nonfiction.

Raised in upstate New York, Kitchen attended Middlebury College in Vermont.  She spent time in Brazil and Scotland before beginning a long teaching career at the State University of New York in Brockport. 

Currently, Kitchen co-directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. She also is a contributing editor for The Georgia Review, where she regularly reviews poetry.            

Kitchen is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the S. Mariella Gable Award for the House on Eccles Road, published by Graywolf Press. Recently, her essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, the Colorado Review, and the Great River Review.

Critics have reacted positively to Kitchen’s “hybrids.” Writer Stuart Dybeck, for instance, calls Half in Shade, “Part memoir, part speculation, part essay, a demonstration of the interactive art of seeing.”

Though forcing Kitchen’s recent work into a pre-ordained niche is a mistake, Circus Train can be considered an almost Proustian meditation on the past. As the narrator confronts her “house of memory,” she hopes to make it “add up.”  Almost defiantly, she refuses to fabricate answers, insisting that “story is the thread by which we stitch the life together.”   Critic Stephen Corey wrote in the Georgia Review, the novella is a “segmented but forceful study, inventive and moving.” 

            For further information, contact Suzann Bick, suzannbick@yahoo.com

 

We invite and welcome you and your friends to join us on March 4 -

Mary-Alice Boulter

North Coast Writers