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Field’s End presents our third one-day writers’ conference at beautiful Kiana Lodge on Saturday, April 26, 2008. Owned and operated by the Suquamish Tribe, in whose language “kiana” means “garden of the gods,” Kiana Lodge is a waterfront conference center overlooking Agate Passage between Bainbridge Island and Poulsbo, Washington.

Supported by Eagle Harbor Book Company

Opening Speaker: Stephanie Kallos (Broken for You)
Keynote Speaker: Roy Blount, Jr. (Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South)
Closing Speaker: Timothy Egan (The Worst Hard Time)

Workshop presenters and Speakers: *

• Alice Acheson
  With over thirty years of experience in publishing, Alice Acheson has seen it all and has much to share. Since leaving her publicity post at Crown Publishers, she has worked as an independent editor, publishing consultant, and publicist. Her many success stories include having worked on four simultaneous New York Times bestsellers.
• Knute Berger
  Knute “Skip” Berger is a Seattle native. He currently writes the “Mossback” column for Crosscut.com, a Pacific Northwest online daily. He also writes a monthly back page column for Seattle Magazine, where he is Editor-at-Large, and is also political columnist for Washington Law & Politics. He is a weekly news commentator on Seattle's public radio station, KUOW-FM. Between 1990 and 2006 Berger did three stints as editor of Seattle Weekly, a newspaper consistently cited by the Society of Professional Journalists as the best “non-daily” in the region.
• Roy Blount, Jr.
  Thanks to National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” Roy Blount is as familiar to radio listeners as he is to readers. After stints as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal and Sports Illustrated, he made the leap to full-time freelance writing in 1975. His books include sports About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, fiction First Hubby, poetry Webster’s Ark and Soupsongs, and the memoir, Be Sweet. His most recent book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South, is a collection of short humorous pieces.
• Lyall Bush
  In addition to serving as director of Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s premiere center for writing, Lyall Bush continues to teach and write. He has taught literature at the college level for two decades and has published in The Iowa Review, Film Comment, Books in Canada and The Seattle Times. In addition to his duties at Hugo House he is working on a collection of stories.
• Timothy Egan
  Timothy Egan has been a Seattle-based national correspondent for The New York Times for 18 years. His work with a team of reporters on the series “How Race is Lived in America” received the Pulitzer Prize. He has been honored with the Washington State Book Award three times: The Good Rain (1991), Lasso the Wind (1999), and The Worst Hard Time (2006) which was also awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His third grade dream of writing a novel was realized in 2004 with the publication of The Winemaker’s Daughter.
• Stephanie Kallos
  Stephanie Kallos spent twenty years in the theater as an actor and teacher. Her first novel, Broken for You (Grove/Atlantic) received the Washington State Book Award, the PNBA Award, and was chosen by Sue Monk Kidd as the December 2004 selection for “The Today Show” book club. As writers “we are responsible for the prose part of the character and the dialogue as well, but the big release you get is the ability to dive into somebody’s head. And that’s the part of acting I liked the most-the inner life.” Kallos’s short fiction has received a Raymond Carver Award and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her second novel, Sing Them Home, will be published by Grove/Atlantic in 2008.
• Laura Kalpakian
  Laura Kalpakian is the author of ten novels and three collections of short fiction. Her latest, American Cookery, is the fourth of her novels set in fictional St. Elmo, California, following These Latter Days, Graced Land and Caveat. She has received a National Endowment of the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and twice the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award. She has also gathered her short fiction in three collections. The New Yorker described her prose as “generous, gritty, sexy, full of lyrical musings, and funny as all get-out.”
• Thomas Kohnstamm
  Thomas Kohnstamm has been both a traveling writer and a travel writer for a decade. In addition to contributing to over a dozen Lonely Planet titles, he has written for The Los Angeles Times, Travel + Leisure, Forbes, and The San Francisco Chronicle. He has also taught travel writing for mediabistro.com in Seattle and New York. His book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventure, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism will be published in Spring 2008.
• Rosina Lippi / Sara Donati
  Rosina Lippi’s path to novelist began with graduate studies in linguistics. By the end of her dissertation fieldwork she not only had scholarly data, but hundreds of stories waiting to be told. Her first novel, Homestead, received the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short listed for the Orange Prize. She also began exploring women’s experiences of early American history under the penname Sara Donati. The resulting Wilderness series now includes six titles, including Queen of Swords. Lippi continues to enjoy switching between novels that are character driven with those that focus on plot. More recently she has turned to contemporary romantic comedy with Tied to the Tracks and The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square (forthcoming).
• Jennifer Louden
  Jennifer Louden has been dividing her time between writing and nurturing others to express themselves since 1992. In addition to being a columnist for Martha Stewart’s Body + Soul magazine, she is the author of five books including The Life Organizer: A Woman's Guide to a Mindful Year.
• Nancy Pagh
  Nancy Pagh’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, The Bellingham Review, Pontoon, Poetry Daily, and O Magazine, and have twice been featured on “The Beat,” a Seattle NPR literary segment. Her first collection, No Sweeter Fat, won the 2006 Autumn House Press book award. At Home Afloat, her study of women’s travel language at sea, was co-published in 2001 by the University of Idaho Press and the University of Calgary Press. She is a 2007 recipient of an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission fellowship and currently teaches English at Western Washington University.
• Charlie Pavlosky
  Since studying theater, film, and music at the School for Performing Arts in London, Pavlosky has worked successfully in all three areas. Still, film and film writing remain his first love. He has written screenplays based on his original stories, helped with production on films including American Beauty and Being John Malkovich, and been guest lecturer at the UCLA school of Theater, Film and Television. He has completed production on his feature film, Dead Letters, and begins production on his next film this spring.
• Sheila Rabe/Sheila Roberts
  Though certain she would become a famous songwriter, Sheila Rabe’s musical career took a back seat when she “got the idea for a great book.” Since then she has written 18 books (fiction and nonfiction), and developed multiple personalities. She has written under the name Sheila Robins, and her latest book, On Strike for Christmas, was penned by her dead-ringer, Sheila Roberts. When not being someone else, she teaches writing, including classes for Field’s End.
• Suzanne Selfors
  Raised on Bainbridge Island, Suzanne Selfors developed a passion for stories and theater at an early age. After graduating with university honors in theater and film, she received a master’s degree in communication from the University of Washington. Once her children were in school, Selfors’s hibernating passion for writing awakened in 2002. She has lived her maxim: “Talent helps, but determination is mandatory.” Her first novel, To Catch a Mermaid, was published in 2007. Her second novel, Saving Juliet, will be published Feb. 4, 2008.
• David Wagoner
  David Wagoner is the author of numerous poetry collections including In Broken Country, and The House of Song. His Collected Poems: 1956-1976 was nominated for the National Book Award. He is also the author of ten novels. In the course of his career Wagoner’s awards have included the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Award and once for the Pulitzer. Francis Coppola made a movie of his novel The Escape Artist. A professor emeritus at University of Washington, he was editor of Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002.

Conference fees include Kiana Lodge’s fabulous salmon (or vegetarian) buffet lunch, continental breakfast, your choice of breakout sessions and/or writing workshops, three speakers, booksigning and a wine and cheese reception. Back this year is the popular workshop Page One centered on your writing.

Cost

Individual
• $135 - February 1 - February 29, 2008
• $150 - March 1 - April 18, 2008

Premier Sponsors

Prudential Northwest Real Estate