Saturday, October 22 | 12 – 1 PM | Community Room / Live Streamed
Please join me in conversation with Oregon authors Jeff Fearnside and Joe Wilkins as we discuss the element of characters in prose writing and how various environments (both natural and built) affect and shape them. The authors will share notes on what they have learned about creating vivid, lifelike characters, and how the interaction of character and environment guides them, using specific strategies employed as examples. They will also each share a short reading from their work and answer questions from the audience.
Can’t make it to our in-person program? The live feed will be available here: https://youtu.be/P0ehj0_Znu4
Jeff Fearnside is the author of two full-length books and two chapbooks, most recently Ships in the Desert (SFWP) and A Husband and Wife Are One Satan (Orison Books). His stories, essays, and poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies such as The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, Story, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (University of Washington Press), and Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet (Press 53). Fearnside lived in Central Asia for four years and has taught writing and literature in Kazakhstan and at various institutions in the U.S., currently Oregon State University.
https://www.jeff-fearnside.com/
Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Born and raised in eastern Montana, Wilkins lives with his family in McMinnville, Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University.