scissortail creative writing festival

2012 Scissortail: The Poster

2012-02-01T12:16:00.000-06:00

2012 Scissortail: Author Biographies

2012-01-29T12:16:00.000-06:00

Dorothy Alexander is a publisher, storyteller, and author of four collections of poetry: The Dust Bowl Revisited, Borrowed Dust, Rough Drafts, and Lessons From an Oklahoma Girlhood, a collection of art and poetry. She also writes non-fiction stories and essays, has edited two collections of oral history about her home community in western Oklahoma, and is the facilitator of the poetry readings at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma. Publication of her memoir about the illness and death of her son is scheduled for late 2012. In a previous life, she was an attorney and municipal judge for thirty-seven years.

Rilla Askew divides her time between New York and Oklahoma. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including World Literature Today, Nimrod, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Askew’s first novel, The Mercy Seat, was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1998. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2001 and was selected for Oklahoma's One Book One State program, in 2007. Her most recent novel, Harpsong, received the Western Heritage Award, the Oklahoma Book Award, the Violet Crown Award, and the Willa Cather Award from Women Writing the West. Askew received a 2009 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is currently serving as Artist in Residence in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Phil Poulter, of TSTC Waco, has aptly described Alan Berecka’s poetry as that of a time worn child or a wise assed mystic. Berecka makes a living as a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. He has published poems in many journals and webzines including The Texas Review, The American Literary Review, Ruminate and the Christian Century. He has published two collections of poems, The Comic Flaw (NeoNuma Arts, 2009) and Remembering the Body (Mongrel Empire Press, 2011). To learn more about the poet and his work, please visit www.alanberecka.com.

Timothy Bradford is the author of the introduction to Sadhus (Cuerpos Pintados, 2003), a photography book on the ascetics of South Asia. In 2005, he received the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award for his novel-in-progress based on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and he was a writer-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Stanford University. From 2007 to 2009, he was a guest researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including 42opus, Bombay Gin, CrossConnect, DIAGRAM, Drunken Boat, ecopoetics, H_NGM_N, Mudlark, No Tell Motel, Poems & Plays, and Upstairs at Duroc, and his first collection, Nomads with Samsonite, was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2011. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tulsa and lives with his wife, two sons, and an ever-changing menagerie just outside of Oklahoma City.

Joey Brown writes poetry, fiction, and essays. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals, most recently Edge, bordertown, San Pedro River Review, The Dos Passos Review, Quiddity, Compass Rose, and The Chaffin Journal. Her poetry collection Oklahomaography was published by Mongrel Empire Press in 2010. She teaches creative, professional, and technical writing courses at Missouri Southern State University, where she directs the writing internship program.

Nathan Brown is a musician, photographer, and award-winning poet from Norman, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Oklahoma and teaches there as well. Mostly he travels now, though, performing readings and concerts as well as speaking and leading workshops in high schools, universities, and community organizations on creativity, creative writing, and the need for readers to not give up on poetry. Nathan has published seven books: Letters to the One-Armed Poet: A Memoir of Friendship, Loss, and Butternut Squash Ravioli (2011), My Sideways Heart (2010), Two Tables Over (2008)—Winner of the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award, Not Exactly Job (2007)—a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, Ashes Over the Southwest (2005), Suffer the Little Voices (2005)—a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award, and Hobson’s Choice (2002). His poem, “Little Jerusalems,” was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize. And in 2010, he released an album of all-original songs, Gypsy Moon. Nathan’s work has appeared in: World Literature Today; Concho River Review; Blue Rock Review; Descant; Texas Poetry Calendar; Sugar Mule; Di-verse-city (anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival); Wichita Falls Literature and Art Review; “Walt’s Corner” of The Long-Islander newspaper (a column started by Whitman in 1838); Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas; Oklahoma Today Magazine; Oklahoma Humanities Magazine; Blood and Thunder; Blueberry Rain and Chocolate Snow; Windhover; Byline Magazine; Blue Hole: Magazine of the Georgetown Poetry Festival; Christian Ethics Today; Crosstimbers; and Poetrybay.com… as well as in five anthologies: Travelin’ Music: A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie (Village Books Press, Cheyenne), Two Southwests (VAC, Chicago), Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing (Mongrel Empire Press, Albuquerque), Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry (Dos Gatos Press, Austin), New Poetry Appreciation (Yunnan University Press, Kunming, China).

James Brubaker is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Confrontation, Blue Mesa Review, The Cupboard, elimae, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, The Texas Review, Pear Noir! and Keyhole Magazine. James is currently finishing his dissertation, which is a collection of short stories revolving around music and musicians.

Rayshell Clapper is an Associate Professor of English at Seminole State College in Seminole, Oklahoma where she teaches Fiction Writing, American Lit, Native American Lit, Introduction to Lit, and Composition classes. She has completed a Master’s of Arts in Creative Writing and a Master’s of Education in English Education. She has presented her original fiction and non-fiction at several conferences and events including: Southwest/Texas Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association Regional Conferences, Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conferences, Sips Open Mic Night, and Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium. Her publications include Red Dirt Anthology, Originals, and Oklahoma English Journal. She currently has a handful of pieces out for consideration. Beyond her written works, she successfully created a writer's group in rural Oklahoma to support burgeoning writers.

J. Don Cook, Oklahoma City, is a writer, photographer and artist whose latest book is Shooting from the Hip, a collection of photographs and essays published by the OU Press. Cook has been nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize and won Oklahoma Photographer of the Year seven times. His art and photographs are housed in major collections around the country. An alum of East Central University, Cook is working on a book about creativity.

Phil Estes is a student in the PhD in Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University. His poems have recently appeared in: The Associative Press (Canada), DIAGRAM, Hayden's Ferry Review, Interrupture, and others, with poems forthcoming in Sonora Review and West Wind Review. His manuscript, High Life, has finished as finalist for the Black Box Poetry Prize and Subito Poetry Prize.

Steve Garrison’s novel Shoveling Smoke was published under the pseudonym “Austin Davis” by Chronicle Books in 2003. He is currently working on a novel set in a small Oklahoma town in the mid-1960s. A professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma, Garrison is currently the director of the M.F.A. degree program in creative writing at UCO. He is married to the writer Constance Squires.

Andrew Geyer’s latest novel is Dixie Fish (Ink Brush Press 2011). His other books are Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin (Ink Brush Press 2010); Meeting the Dead (University of New Mexico Press 2007); and Whispers in Dust and Bone (Texas Tech University Press 2003), which won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards and the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Geyer's work has appeared in Texas Review, South Dakota Review, Southwestern American Literature, descant, and many other literary magazines and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He was recently named Featured Fiction Fellow for the 2010 Batchelor Emerging Writers Series at Barton College. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina at Aiken.

In the past, Bayard Godsave’s work has appeared in the Cream City Review, Confrontation, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cimarron Review and the Evansville Review, among other places. One of the stories, “00:02:36:58,” which originally appeared in Carolina Quarterly in 2005, was included in 2006 in Flash Fiction Forward, an anthology of short short fiction published by WW Norton, and was anthologized again this past year in a collection called Upside Down B, which is an English textbook used in secondary schools in Sweden. In 2001 he received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Moorhead; in 2008 he received his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and currently Bayard is an Assistant Professor of English at Cameron University.

Patricia Goodrich has been featured reader at writers’ conferences, including the Druskininkai International Festival, Lithuania, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, USA. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Lithuanian and Romanian. She is a recipient of fellowships through the Andy Warhol Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Europos Parkas (Lithuania), Inter-Art Foundation (Romania) Leeway Foundation, Makole Sculpture Symposium (Slovenia), Puffin Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Goodrich also received Pennsylvania Fellowships in Poetry/Creative Nonfiction and was nominated for Pushcart Prizes in poetry and fiction. She is Pennsylvania’s 2005 Bucks County Poet Laureate. Poetry books include How the Moose Got to Be (forthcoming 2012, VAC press), Verda’s House (VAC 2010) and Red Mud (VAC Press 2009). Her work also appears in six chapbooks, as well as numerous literary journals and anthologies. www.patriciagoodrich.com

Joshua Grasso is an Assistant Professor of English at East Central University. He has his Ph.D. in English from Miami University, specializing in British literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to publishing articles on writers such as Defoe, Kipling, and Elspeth Huxley, he has recently completed his first novel, for young adults, entitled The Portrait Behind the Portrait.

Carol Hamilton is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize five times. She has won a Southwest Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, Cherubim Award, Chiron Review Chapbook Award, David Ray Poetry Prize, the Byline Literary Awards for both short story and poetry, and the Warren Keith Poetry Prize. She is a former elementary school teacher, college and university professor, and currently translates at a clinic for women and children and for medical teams to Latino countries. She has nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. She received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Central Oklahoma in 2007. She has published 16 books of poetry, children's novels and legends. She has recent and upcoming works in the in Poet Lore, South Carolina Review, Cold Mountain Review, Tulane Review, Slipstream, Texas Poetry Calendar, Southwest American Literature, Tar River Review, San Pedro River Review, California Quarterly, Poem, Flint Hills Review, Main Street Rag, Willow Review, Aurorean, Cape Rock, and others.

Michael Howarth grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. After earning a BA in English at James Madison University, he entered the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska at Anchorage where he studied the novel and short story. He then earned a PhD in Children’s Literature at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Currently Michael teaches Children's literature, Young Adult literature, and Film Studies at Missouri Southern State University. He also directs the Honors Program. His short stories and essays have appeared in such publications as The Southwestern Review, Flashquake, Farmhouse Magazine, DASH Literary Journal, Mud Luscious, Cave Region Review, and Cybersoleil Literary Journal. At the moment, Michael’s agent is submitting his debut novel, Fair Weather Ninjas, to editors and publishing houses.

Currently, when not gallivanting around the Middle East, LeAnne Howe, (enrolled citizen in the Choctaw Nation) is Professor of English, American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, and, Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing. She makes her homes in Ada, Oklahoma; Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, and most recently Amman, Jordan. Author of three books, Howe’s fiction appears in Fiction International, Callaloo, Story, Yalobusha Review, Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark, and she’s held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Writers’ Residency, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Jessica Isaacs is Division Chair of Language Arts and Humanities at Seminole State College, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition, and serves as the Director of SSC’s Annual Howlers and Yawpers Creativity Symposium. She enjoys experimenting with form in writing, often combining cross-genre techniques of playwriting, poetry, and fiction. She believes in delving head-first into a character's voice and perspective in order to spark the writing into an active experience for the reader. Recently, she presented her poetry with the “WoodyFest Poets” as part of the annual Woody Guthrie Festival Events in 2011 at the Istvan Art Gallery in Oklahoma City and Okemah venues, and she has presented her original flash fiction at the 2011 Southwest / Texas Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Joint Conference. She claims she is officially “coming out of the closet as a poet,” and is loving every minute of it. Her selections are from her Sycamore Collection of poetry, a work in progress.

Hardy Jones has had over thirty pieces of fiction and nonfiction published in journals, and his writing has been awarded two grants. He is the author of the novel Every Bitter Thing, and he is the executive editor of the online journal Cybersoleil. He is an Assistant Professor at Cameron University where he directs the Creative Writing Program.

Abigail Keegan has a Ph.D. in Literature and teaches British and Women’s Literature at Oklahoma City University. She has authored a critical book, Byon’s Othered Self and Voice: Contexualizing the Homographic Signature. She has published three books of poetry including The Feast of the Assumptions and Oklahoma Journey. Her most recent book, Depending on the Weather, was published in 201l. She has read her poetry at universities and at poetry festivals throughout the southwest and published in journals and anthologies. She is currently working on a book about 20^th century gothic women writers of Scotland and two new poetry collections.

Jennifer Kidney is a freelance scholar and author of six books of poetry: Field Encounters, Endangered Species, Animal Magnetism, Women Who Sleep with the Dogs, Life List, and Road Work Ahead. She has twice been nominated for Oklahoma Poet Laureate—by the Oklahoma Library Association in 2006 and by the Jim Lucas-Checotah Public Library in 2008, when she was one of three finalists for the distinction. She has a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and a M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from Yale University and more than twenty years of university level teaching experience. She has also worked as a technical writer, poet-in-the-schools, and arts administrator. Kidney has won awards for her poetry, technical writing, and brownie baking. She lives in Norman where she tends her quarter acre and its birds and other creatures and keeps house for her three cats and her dog Lizzie.

Haesong Kwon was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and emigrated to the United States with family when he was eight-years old. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Currently, he is a Ph.D. Student in English at Oklahoma State University, where he teaches classes in composition and creative writing, and serves as an assistant editor at the Cimarron Review. His poems have appeared in New Orleans Review, Oxford Magazine, Quarterly West, Red Rock Review, Roger and others.

Chuck Ladd has successfully taught English in public schools in Southern Oklahoma and Northern Texas for over thirty years while also serving as adjunct professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University for twenty-three years. He has also published a number of poetic works in a variety of journals and literary periodicals, but has dedicated himself to the advancement of Howard Starks’ poetry. Howard Starks was born in 1929 in Shidler, Oklahoma. He served in the U.S. Army before earning a degree in English Education from East Central Oklahoma State University. He was all-but-dissertation Ph.D in English at the University of Oklahoma where he taught as a graduate assistant before teaching at the University of Nevada in Reno and the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1968 He became a professor of English and Humanities at Southeastern Oklahoma State University where he served until his retirement in 1995. In retirement Starks finally found time to collect and work on his poetry, mainly at the behest of fellow professors Elbert and Marion Hill and Dennis and Billie Letts. At Southeastern in Durant, Oklahoma, Tracy Letts , the son of Billie and Dennis began to view Howard as a mentor and would take the title of his Pulitzer Prize winning play "August: Osage County" directly from the title of one of Howard's poems. Starks only published book was Family Album (A Collection of Poetry) in 1996 and became a finalist in the 1997 Oklahoma Book Awards. A New York Times best-selling novelist, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, a number of prize-winning poets, a nationally acclaimed western artist, a number of actors from stage and screen, several other novelists all praise his work and consider him a friend and mentor. Howard Starks died in Durant, Oklahoma April 7th, 2003.

George McCormick’s new fiction collection, Salton Sea, will be coming out this summer through Noemi Press (Las Cruces).

Michael Melancon, descendent from the 18^th-century French settlers forced to migrate from Acadia (now Nova Scotia) to Louisiana, grew up in a working-class section of Baton Rouge, attending grade school in the shadow of the enormous Exxon refinery located along a road named—with unintended irony—Scenic Highway. Baton Rouge sits at the north end of a geographical corridor along the Mississippi River that contains hundreds of chemical plants and has been dubbed by environmentalists—with intended irony—Cancer Alley. Michael’s poetry reflects the influence of these industrial and historical forces. Michael is in his final year of matriculation in the MFA program in creative writing at Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared in Big Muddy, Off the Coast, and The Fiddleback.

Melissa Morphew is the recent winner of a Sacramento Poetry Center Press Book Award for her fifth collection Bluster. Her work has appeared in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She is a native Tennessean transplanted to Texas where she teaches creative writing at Sam Houston State University.

Along with publishing Noise and Stories, John Morris is attempting to finish a second book of poems (tentatively entitled Unwritten Histories). He has recently published poems in Flint Hills Review and Sugar Mule (and reprinted in Ain't Nobody Can Sing Like Me). Having given twenty-four years of his life to freshman English, American literature, film, and creative writing at Cameron University, he remains Professor of English.

Benjamin Myers won the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for his first book, Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in The New York Quarterly, Nimrod, Plainsongs, Borderlands, Measure, The Iron Horse Literary Review, and many other journals. His essays have appeared in academic publications such as Studies in Philology and English Literary History, and he frequently reviews books of contemporary poetry for several journals in print and online. With a Ph.D. from Washington University, he teaches literature and poetry writing at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Patrick Ocampo was born in the Philippines and raised in Brampton Ontario Canada. He began his writing career at the University of Toronto where he won the Ladoo Book Prize for Creative Writing. He took courses in Creative Writing while working on his Master’s Degree in Behavioral Science at Cameron University, and an appearance at the Scissortail Writer’s Festival resulted in the publication of his first collection of poems and short stories entitled Surface Tension, published by Mongrel Empire Press. Patrick currently resides in Bartlesville Oklahoma and teaches at Tulsa Community College. His work has been anthologized in Aint Nobody Can Sing Like Me and Agave: A Celebration of Tequila. He is working on a new collection of poems tentatively titled “A Stranger Everywhere”.

Juan Manuel Perez, a Mexican-American poet from La Pryor, Texas, is the author of Another Menudo Sunday (2007), O' Dark Heaven: A Response To Suzette Haden Elgin's Definition Of Horror (2009), WUI: Written Under The Influence Of Trinidad Sanchez, Jr. (2011), and six other poetry chapbooks. Juan is also the 2011-2012 Poet Laureate for the San Antonio Poets Association.

Shaun Perkins is a teacher, storyteller, and poet whose work has been published in
The Phoenix, Slipstream, Midland Review, Touchstone, and other journals. She is the state liaison and webmaster for Oklahoma’s state storytelling organization Territory Tellers. She has been a teacher of the year and currently teaches at Oaks Mission High School. Her degrees are in English from Oklahoma State University and in Liberal Studies from the University of Oklahoma. She has presented writing, literature, and storytelling workshops at the National Storytelling Convention, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, the Popular Culture Convention, the Spirit of Oklahoma Storytelling Festival, the Story Circle Network Conference, and more. She lives in Locust Grove, where she is currently working as curator for the Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry (ROMPoetry.com).

In 2003, Jason Poudrier was deployed to Iraq, wounded in action, and awarded the Purple Heart. He advanced to the rank of sergeant before being honorably discharged in 2005. He then completed an English degree at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. His work has appeared in several journals including the New Mexico Poetry Review, Connecticut Review, Sugar Mule and The Goldmine and has been anthologized in a collection by Oklahoma writers titled Ain't Nobody that Can Sing Like Me. His first chapbook In the Rubble at Our Feet was published in 2010. His first full collection of war poems titled Red Fields was published in spring 2012.

Elizabeth Raby’s two previous books, Ink on Snow, (2010) and The Year the Pears Bloomed Twice, 2009, were both published by Virtual Artists Collective (www.vacpoetry.org). Her book, In the Shadow, is scheduled to be published in 2012, also by Virtual Artists. She is the author of three chapbooks and her work has appeared in numerous journals. Elizabeth has lived in Santa Fe, NM since 2001. There, she and her husband, Jim, conduct a monthly open poetry reading at Tribes Coffee House. Elizabeth is on the board of New Mexico Literary Arts. She worked as a poet-in-the schools for many years and taught poetry at Muhlenberg College.

The poems and stories of Charlotte Renk are products of long walks in the woods behind her cabin and reflections accumulated over many years of living and teaching. Charlotte says, “I love this earth; it instructs my living in a difficult world. And in my twenty-five years of teaching English and humanities at Trinity Valley Community College here in Athens, TX, I have tried to convey this love for people and nature.” Charlotte has published in Kalliope, Mochila Review, New Texas-’95, ’98, Concho River Review, Sow’s Ear, and Southwest Review. Eakin Press published These Holy Hungers in 2009, and Poetry in the Arts published her book, Solidalgo, An Altar to Weeds, in 2010. Currently, Charlotte is working on a fiction manuscript entitled, Fires She Couldn’t Put Out. One of those stories won the National Storyteller Award, and three of those stories were published in Langdon Review of Arts in Texas, 1911. Charlotte says, “What matters most is my love of life —family, nature, teaching, hiking, wildflowers, birds, mountains and streams, which function often as metaphors to help me cope with the Way of life. I may have to live a very long time to get there.”

The poems and essays of Carol Coffee Reposa have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Formalist, The Texas Observer, Southwestern American Literature, Coal City Review, The Valparaiso Review, and other journals. Author of three collections of poetry, she has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, as well as three Fulbright-Hays Fellowships for study in Russia, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. A professor emeritus of English at San Antonio College, Reposa remains active in her profession through work as nonfiction editor of Concho River Review, adjunct instruction at St. Mary's University, and free-lance editing. She has been twice a finalist for Texas State Poet Laureate.

Greg Rodgers is a writer and Choctaw storyteller from Warr Acres, Oklahoma. He is the author of two books, The Ghost of Mingo Creek and other Spooky Oklahoma Legends and One Dark Night in Oklahoma. Both are collections of short-stories based on actual legends from around the state. Rodgers’ story contribution, “Giddy Up, Wolfy,” appears in the graphic-anthology Trickster, which is listed as a 2011 Children’s Notable Book from the American Library Association. Greg has presented and performed at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. and is an official Smithsonian Associate. As a storyteller and workshop presenter, he appears at schools, libraries, festivals, conferences, universities, and tribal events throughout the country. His performances are a public demonstration of his true passion, the collection and respectful preservation of his people’s memories----the foundation of the Choctaw oral narrative.

Regina Schroeder was raised by anarcho-syndicalist wolves in an urban jungle. She was permanently warped by early exposure to atonal music, west Texas, Piaget, and the picture books of Eugene Ionesco.

Steven Schroeder was born in Wichita Falls and grew up northwest of Amarillo in Oldham County. He is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective (vacpoetry.org), which has published five full-length poetry collections each year since it began in 2004. His most recent poetry collection (with Debby Sou Vai Keng) is a guest giving way like ice melting: thirteen ways of looking at laozi. Four Truths, a collection of three short stories and a drama in verse (with paintings by Debby Sou Vai Keng) was published by Wipf and Stock in 2011. He teaches at the University of Chicago in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults.

Karen Eileen Sisk received her M.A. in Literature and Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio in June of 2008. Since then, she has been working on a doctorate in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Permafrost, Harpur Palate, and Barely South.

Sandra Soli's new poetry collection, Child's Play, is based on her early childhood in wartime England. Emigrating to the U.S. with her mother aboard the Cunard liner Brittanic, Sandra became a naturalized citizen in 1963. A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Central Oklahoma, she earned an honors M.A. in creative writing; and this past summer studied with Gregory Orr at Mt. Holyoke with a grant from Image Journal. Sandy traveled in the Oklahoma artist-in-residence program for a decade, also serving as columnist and poetry editor for ByLine Magazine. In addition to writing and editing, she teaches online and by invitation, facilitating workshops in poetry, short fiction, and memoir, and in 2011 keynoted an inspirational writing conference. Sandra has published in more than sixty literary markets, with an article featured in the 2009 edition of Poet's Market. Awards include LSU's Eyster Poetry Prize, the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award in poetry, and three Pushcart Prize nominations, also nominated for the AWP Intro Award. Recent publications include Naugatuck River Review, Burnt Bridge, War, Literature, and the Arts, Cross Timbers, and the 2012 Texas Poetry Calendar. Sandy contributed this year to anthologies Agave, edited by Ashley & Nathan Brown, Broken Circles, a fundraising project benefiting food pantries across America, and Shifting Balance Sheets, a book focusing on immigration and naturalization issues. She has presented at Woody Guthrie festivals, at literary symposia, and previous Scissortail festivals. Currently on the board of the Oklahoma Center for the Book, Sandy enjoys collaborative projects with artists in other disciplines and has worked with artists, musicians, dancers, and clergy to develop new works.

Jim Spurr received his undergraduate degree from Oklahoma Baptist University. He is an honorably discharged veteran, a retired insurance adjustor and husband to Aline. In addition to running the popular Thursday night open mic in Shawnee, Oklahoma, his poetry has been published in Main Street Rag, Iconoclat, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Clark Street Review, California Quarterly, Rattle, Nerve Cowboy, Broomweed Journal, Sugar Mule, Blood and Thunder, and Red River Review. His poems were anthologized in Aint Nobody that can Sing Like Me, and his Open Mike/Thursday Night was a 2008 finalist for the Oklahoma book award.

Constance Squires’s novel Along the Watchtower was published in 2011 by Riverhead/Penguin, and she has completed a new novel, set in Medicine Park, entitled The Return of Lena Jack. Her short fiction has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Identity Theory, Eclectica, The Dublin Quarterly, The New Delta Review, The Gingko Tree Review, Bayou, and The Briar Cliff Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Village Voice, Salon, and Largehearted Boy, and was featured on the NPR Radio program Snap Judgment. She is the winner of the Bob Schacochis Short Story Award, the Matt Clark Fiction Prize, and the Briar Cliff Review Short Fiction Award, and she has received numerous nominations for Best New American Voices, the Pushcart Prize, the Million Writers Award, and the O Henry Prize. She lives with her husband and daughter in Edmond, Oklahoma, where she teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Jonathan Stalling is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Oklahoma specializing in American and Transpacific Poetry and Poetics. Stalling is the author of Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham, 2010) and a co-editor of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition (Fordham, 2008). He is the author of two books of poetry, Grotto Heaven (Chax, 2010) and Yíngēlìshī (Counterpath, 2011). A translator, Stalling has published translations of works by Shi Zhi and Bei Dao, and Li Yu and is the translator of a collection of poetry entitled, Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi 1966-2007 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). His opera, Yíngēlìshī debuted on the campus of Yunnan University in 2010 which can be watched at his webpage:http://jonathanstalling.com. Stalling is the co-founder and editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine (CLT) http://www.ou.edu/clt, and the editor of the CLT Book Series (at the University of Oklahoma Press), the founder and Director of the Mark Allen Everett Poetry Reading Series at OU, and the Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of China’s Literature Abroad at Beijing Normal University.

Andrew Terhune is originally from Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks Helen Mirren Picks Out My Clothes (Greying Ghost press, 2010) and Handle This Bludgeon and Run Me Through (Tilt Press, 2008). His manuscript No Tee Vee was named a finalist for the 2011 Augury Books Editors’ Prize. Poems from No Tee Vee have recently appeared in Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Court Green, 5AM, Meridian, DIAGRAM, and West Wind Review.

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, was the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. He has published eighteen collections of poems, most recently A Murder of Crows (Virtual Artists Collective 2011) and The Red, Candle-lit Darkness (El Grito del Lobo Press 2011). His New and Selected Poems (TCU Press 2008) was long-listed for the National Book Award. Mr. Thomas has been a frequent contributor of poetry to numerous national literary journals, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Texas Review, Southwestern American Literature, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, Concho River Review, descant: Fort Worth’s Journal of Poetry and Fiction, Louisiana Literature, Windhover, San Pedro River Review, and Right Hand Pointing (online).

Rebecca Hatcher Travis, an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, frequently writes about her native heritage and the wonder of the natural world. Her first poetry book, Picked Apart the Bones, won the 2006 First Book Award for Poetry by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and was published by the Chickasaw Press in 2008. Other published work appears in literary journals, anthologies, Sol Magazine and Friendswood Public Library blog online, historical publications, The Chickasaw Times and Texas Poetry Calendar 2008, 2011 and 2012. She is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, Bay Area Writers League, Gulf Coast Poets and the Poetry Society of Texas. She often reads at Houston area poetry venues.

Ron Wallace has four volumes of poetry, all published by TJMF Publishing of Clarksville, Indiana: Native Son (American Poems from the Heart of Oklahoma), a finalist in the 2007 Oklahoma Book Awards, Smoke and Stone (The Voices of Gettysburg) and I Come from Cowboys… and Indians, the winner of the 2009 Oklahoma Writer's Federation Best Book of Poetry Award. His latest book is Oklahoma Cantos. Ron is a native Oklahoman whose Scots/Irish roots are woven securely into his Choctaw, Cherokee, Osage lineage. He is currently an adjunct faculty member of Southeastern Oklahoma State University. His work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies such as: Oklahoma Today, Sugar Mule, Crosstimbers, Encore, NFSPS Prize Poems, Grandmother Earth XIV, di-verse-city 2011, Walt's Corner in The Long Islander, The Enigmatist and Travelin' Music (A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie).

Sarah Webb is retired from teaching English at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. She edits poetry and fiction for USAO’s interdisciplinary journal Crosstimbers and serves as co-editor for Just This, an online Zen arts magazine. Her essays and poetry have appeared most recently in Zen Gong, Brevities, Texas Poetry Calendar 2012, and Blue Rock Review.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Author of two poetry chapbooks, Disposition for Shininess (Factory Hollow Press, 2008) and Post Pardon (Mouthfeel Press, 2011), she was selected by the San Francisco Guardian for the 2010 Hot Pink List. Member of the PlayGround writers’ pool, her play Frigidare was staged for the 2011 PlayGround Festival at the Thick House Theater (CA). Recipient of the inaugural Rose O’Neill Literary House summer residency at Washington College in Maryland, she has also received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet and in the anthology and staged production of Fingernails Across A Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora. Her full-length collection of poems Hurrah's Nest is published by Virtual Artists Collective in 2012.

Jim Wilson is a professor of English at Seminole State College in Seminole, Oklahoma. He has an MFA in creative nonfiction (2007) from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. He will read from his memoir-in-progress, The Journeyman, which is about love in the time of civil war Lebanon.

Clarence Wolfshohl is professor emeritus of English at William Woods University. He operated Timberline Press for thirty-five years until the end of 2010. His poetry and creative fiction have appeared in Concho River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Colere, Rattlesnake Review, Cenizo Journal, and Melic Review, Muse^2,Houston Literary Reviewand Right Hand Pointingonline. Recently, a chapbook of poems about Brazil, Season of Mangos, was published by Adastra Press (2009) and a compilation of three earlier chapbooks, The First Three (2010), and Down Highway 281 (2011) were published by El Grito del Lobo Press. A native Texan, Wolfshohl now lives with his wife, his writing, two dogs and two cats in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri.

2012 Scissortail: Schedule of Readings

2012-01-18T16:02:00.001-06:00

Scissortail Creative Writing Festival
7th Annual: April 5 – 7, 2012
East Central University – Ada, Oklahoma

Thursday, April 5

I. 9:30 – 10: 45 Estep Auditorium

Jennifer Kidney, Norman, Oklahoma
Road Work Ahead
Rayshell Clapper, Seminole State College
Letter from an Oklahoma Prison
Timothy Bradford, Tulsa University
Nomads with Samsonite

II. 11:00 – 12: 15 Estep Auditorium

Larry Thomas, Alpine, Texas
The Red, Candle-lit Darkness
Dorothy Alexander, Oklahoma City
The Fractured Land: An Elegy
Jonathan Stalling, University of Oklahoma
Yingelishi

*** Lunch ***

III. 2:00 – 3: 15 North Lounge

Jim Spurr, Shawnee, Oklahoma
It’s Cool at 2 am.
Bayard Godsave, Cameron University
Scenes from a Robbery: Elgin, OK 1933
Shaun Perkins, Locust Grove, Oklahoma
Myths and Okies

IV. 2:00 – 3:15 Estep Auditorium

Ron Wallace, SEOSU
Horses and Hawks
Juan Manuel Perez, La Pryor, Texas
Life Around the Tortilla Curtain
Carol Hamilton, Midwest City, Oklahoma
Lexicography/Master of Theater

V. 3:30 – 4:20 Estep Auditorium

Andrew Geyer, University of South Carolina
Dixie Fish
Chuck Ladd, SEOSU
August Osage County to Broadway

VI. 3:30 – 4:20 North Lounge

Melissa Morphew, Sam Houston State University
This is the Syntax Called Bettie Page
Don Cook, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Shooting from the Hip

VII. 6:30 – Ataloa Theater
Hallie Brown Ford Fine Arts Center

Featuring Natasha Trethewey

Fisher High School Contest Winners
Author Reception, Oak Hills Country Club

Friday, April 6

VIII. 9:00 – 9:50 Estep Auditorium

Rebecca Travis, Sulphur, Oklahoma
Picked Apart the Bones
Clarence Wofshohl, Fulton, Missouri
Season of Mangos

IX. 9:00 – 9:50 North Lounge

Abigail Keegan, Oklahoma City University
Dog Watch and Howl
Jim Wilson, Seminole State College
The Journeyman

X. 10:00 – 10:50 North Lounge

Constance Squires, Univ. of Central Oklahoma
The Return of Lena Jack
Charlotte Renk, Trinity Valley Community Coll.
Ubiquitous Voices

XI. 10:00 -10:50 Estep Auditorium

Alan Berecka, Del Mar College
Remembering the Body
Sandra Soli, Edmond, Oklahoma
Child’s Play

XII. 11:00 – 11:50 Estep Auditorium

Elizabeth Raby, Santa Fe, New Mexico
A Unity and other poems
Steven & Regina Schroeder and friends
A Flood of Absence

XIII. 11:00 – 11:50 North Lounge

John Morris, Cameron University
4 April and other poems
Joshua Grasso, East Central University
On-Hold Apocalypse

*** Lunch ***

XIV. 2:00 – 3:15 North Lounge

Joey Brown, Missouri Southern State U.
Dance Hall Summer, 1963
George McCormick, Cameron University
Salton Sea
Mike Melancon, Oklahoma State University
The Post-Industrial Cajun: Poems

XV. 2:00 -3:15 Estep Auditorium

Phil Estes, Oklahoma State University
Daddio(s)
Stephen Garrison, Univ. Central Oklahoma
The Voice of One Mumbling in the Wilderness
Arisa White, Oakland, California
Hurrah’s Nest

XVI. 3:30 – 4:45 Estep Auditorium

Jessica Isaacs, Seminole State College
The Sycamore Collection
Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State U.
The Big Bang of Lunatic Slaves
Sarah Webb, Burnet,Texas
Encounters in the Wild

XVII. 3:30 – 4:45 North Lounge

Patricia Goodrich, Richlandtown, Pennsylvania
How the Moose Got To Be
Hardy Jones, Cameron University
Three Destiny Experiences
Karen Eileen Sisk, Oklahoma State University
The Recovery Project

XVIII. 6:30 Estep Auditorium

Featuring Norbert Krapf

Page One Literary Art Gallery
Ada Arts & Heritage Center
Saturday, April 7

XIX. 9:00 – 10: 30 Estep Auditorium

Andrew Terhune, Oklahoma State University
No Tee Vee
Greg Rodgers, Warr Acres, Oklahoma
One Dark Night in Oklahoma
Carol Reposa, San Antonio, Texas
With Pen in Hand, 40 years of Poetry
Jason Poudrier, Rush Springs, Oklahoma
Red Fields

XX. 9:00 -10:30 North Lounge

Patrick Ocampo, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
Poems and Flash Fiction
Ben Myers, Oklahoma Baptist University
Lapse Americana
James Brubaker, Oklahoma State University
Flavor Flav Travels through Time and Reads About Himself in Wikipedia
Haesong Kwon, Oklahoma State University
A Day’s Worth of Thistle

XXI. 10:45 – 12:00 Estep Auditorium

LeAnne Howe, Ada, Oklahoma
Writing the Crest of Revolution: A Choctaw in King Abdullah’s Court
Nathan Brown, Norman, Oklahoma
Karma Crisis
Rilla Askew, University of Central Oklahoma
Snake Killing

Scissortail Hotel Rooms: 2012

2012-01-06T13:21:00.002-06:00

Once again, The Holiday Inn Express has been designated as the official festival hotel. A special rate of $85/night is available to you and your guests attending festival. Please identify the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival with the hosts when you make arrangements.

For reservations call Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites of Ada at 580-310-9200 or email holidayinnexpressada@cableone.net. (If there is any confusion, ask for Olivia).

You are advised to make hotel arrangements early. Ada has a shortage of quality rooms, and you never know when a rodeo will come to town. April is a busy month, and there will likely be competition for the rooms.

All the best

Ken

The Third Annual Page One Literary Art Gallery

2012-01-06T13:19:00.000-06:00

(From October 2009 issue of Frieze.)

Submissions are now being accepted for the ThirdAnnual Page One Literary Art Gallery, which will be open for viewing on one night only: Friday, April 6th, 2012, from 7:30 p.m. to 10 p. m. at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center at 400 S. Rennie Street in Ada, Oklahoma.

Submissions:

· are welcomed from any writers--emerging or emerged--who would like to get in on the Scissortail vibe;

· may be in any creative writing genre (poetry, flash fiction, graphic fiction, excerpt from a longer work, etc.);

· must not be previously published;

· must be limited to one submission per author;

· must include author’s name, school affiliation (if any) and status (student, teacher, etc., if applicable) on a separate sheet;

· may be submitted via e-mail (as a Word attachment), snail mail (see addresses below) or dropped off in the door box in at ECU in the Horace Mann Building, room 316A;

· must be submitted by 1 p.m. on Friday, March 30th;

· will be displayed at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center and may also be displayed on this website and at ecuenglishtalk;

· must be limited to a single page. Submissions that run longer than a page may be displayed in full on ecu’s englishtalk website, but when determining awards, judges will only consider the first page of the entry and only the first page of the entry will be displayed at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center.

"Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I " (1805-2807) by Jacques-Louis David

The authors of outstanding submissions:

· will be identified by our panel of faculty judges;

· will be awarded with gift certificates designated for the purchase of books (authors scheduled to appear in the Scissortail reading program will not be in the running for these awards);

· must be in attendance at the Scissortail Wrap when the awards are distributed, one hour after the conclusion of the reading presented by Scissortail's featured speaker on Friday, April 6th, 2012 at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center;

· send your submissions to: sbenton@ecok.edu (subject line: Page One Literary Art Gallery) or mail to Steve Benton at 1100 E. 14^th Street, PMB B-7, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma 74820-6999.

This event enjoys the sponsorship and support of Literati (ECU’s English Student Club), Originals (ECU’s student-run creative writing journal), ECU’s Sigma Tau Delta chapter(International English Honor Society), and the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Scissortail Submission Guidelines

2011-09-29T09:29:00.001-05:00

East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma

Presents the 7th Annual

Scissortail Creative Writing Festival

April 5 - April 7, 2012

Featuring: Norbert Krapf & Natasha Trethewey

The Scissortail Festival celebrates published and emerging authors reading from their original creative works of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction.

Guidelines: Please read closely and follow explicitly. Please look at your calendar before submitting! Due to the increasing popularity of the festival, it is very difficult to accommodate special scheduling requests. Please do not ask.

* Reading sessions feature a mixture of authors and genre.

* Sessions will consist of 3 or 4 readers per session. Authors should plan for either 15 or 20 minutes total time at the mic (including prose) depending on the session.

* No workshops, how-to, propaganda or pre-arranged panels are acceptable.

* Email submissions encouraged. Submit: 1) complete contact information 2) the title of your program and sample/s of work to be considered 3) a paragraph-length biographical narrative, including publications and significant accomplishments.

* Deadline for submission: January 9, 2012. Reading schedule will be set in early February.

* Send email submissions to: khada@ecok.edu. Identify “Scissortail Submission” in the subject line. You may also mail submissions to: Dr. Hada, Department of English & Languages, East Central University, 1100 E. 14th St. Ada, OK 74820.

* Please check your calendar before submitting. Participants are not charged registration fees. See http://www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com for information & updates.

* Special thanks to primary supporters: Dr. Darryl Fisher, East Central University Foundation, Inc., Oklahoma Arts Council and ECU Cultural Activities Committee.

Scissortail 2012

2011-09-23T11:00:00.000-05:00

The annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is back for its seventh year with featured authors Norbert Krapf and Natasha Trethewey. In addition, more than 50 regional, published and emerging authors will make presentations during the three-day festival, April 5 – April 7, 2012 on the campus of East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. All sessions are free and open to the public.

Norbert Krapf, emeritus professor of English at Long Island University and native of Jasper, a German community in southern Indiana hill country, moved to Indianapolis from the New York area in 2004 and since then has published five books and a CD with jazz pianist-composer Monika Herzig, Imagine. He also collaborates with bluesman Gordon Bonham, with whom he started working as part of the Hoosier Dylan show produced by folksinger and actor Tim Grimm. He serves on the board of Etheridge Knight, Inc., whose mission is to bring the arts to the underserved, and as Indiana Poet Laureate 2008-10 had a mission of reuniting poetry and song. In 2012 Indiana University Press will release his collaboration with photographer Richard Fields, Songs in Sepia and Black and White. Included is a section of 26 poems about music, “Practically with the Band.” He is the recipient of a recent Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis to combine poetry and music, with an emphasis on the blues, and Garrison Keillor has read a poem of his on The Writer’s Almanac on NPR.

Other recent publications are Invisible Presence, with photographer Darryl Jones (IU Press, 2006), Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, with photographer David Pierini (IU Pr., 2008), and Sweet Sister Moon (WordTech Editions, 2009), celebrations of women, as well as the prose memoir The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008). He was awarded the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, has twice served as a Senior Fulbright Professor of American Poetry at the Universities of Freiburg (1980-81) and Erlangen-Nuremberg (1988-89) Germany, and his The Country I Come From (Archer Books, 2002) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. More info about him, including videos and audio files of his readings and recitations with musicians, is available at www.krapfpoetry.com and on Facebook. His books are available from www.amazon.com and directly from the publishers at http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/, http://www.wordtechweb.com/krapf.html, and http://www.timebeing.com/shop/authors/norbert-krapf.

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

Since then, she has published two more collections of poetry, including Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). Her work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, North American Review, and The Southern Review, among other magazines and anthologies.

In her introduction to Domestic Work, Rita Dove said, "Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts—reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie, for strength."

Trethewey's honors include the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

The 8th Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

2011-09-23T10:51:00.002-05:00

East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma Presents
Oklahoma’s Most Prestigious High School Writing Competition

Prizes awarded at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, April 5-7, 2012.

Fiction: 1st Place $250; 2nd Place $150; 3rd Place $100

Poetry: 1st Place $250; 2nd Place $150; 3rd Place $100

20 Honorable Mention Awards of $25 each

Guidelines:
* All Oklahoma high school students (9th - 12th grade) are eligible.
* Poetry (up to 100 lines) or Short Fiction (up to 6,000 words) is acceptable.
* Limit 5 poems and 1 short fiction piece per student.
* All entries must be the original work of the student.
* All entries must be neatly typed; please double-space fiction entries.
* Entries will not be returned, so keep your originals.
* No identifying marks should be on the manuscript itself, except for the title.
* Provide cover page with contact information: 1) Student’s name; 2) Teacher’s name 3) School 4) Classification 5) Phone number, email and mailing address.
* Work may be submitted through conventional mail or email.

DEADLINE: Conventional mail must be postmarked on or before February 3, 2012. Email entries must be sent by 11:59 p.m. on February 3, 2012. There will be no exceptions.

Winners will be notified in early March, and awards will be presented at the Scissortail Writing Festival held on the East Central University campus, April 5, 2012. A list of winners and winning entries will be posted online at www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.

Please see the left-hand column of this site for a list of 2010 and 2011 winners.

Poetry Submissions: send work electronically as attached files to jgrasso@ecok.edu or mail to Dr. Joshua Grasso, East Central University, Dept. of English & Languages, 1100 E. 14th St., Ada, OK 74820

Fiction Submissions: send work electronically as attached files to mwalling@ecok.edu or mail to Dr. Mark Walling, East Central University, Dept. of English and Languages, 1100 E. 14th St., Ada, OK 74820

Contest Information: Dr. Joshua Grasso (580-559-5430); Dr. Mark Walling (580-559-5440). Scissortail Creative Writing Festival Information: Dr. Ken Hada (580-559-5557)

Scissortail Creative Writing Festival Contact Information

2011-08-04T13:12:00.000-05:00

If you have any questions, please contact the Festival Director, Professor Ken Hada at 580-559-5557 (khada@ecok.edu).

2011: That's a Wrap

2011-04-02T16:00:00.008-05:00

Scissortail 2011 is in the bag. Congratulations to all who read and all who heard.
We look forward to seeing you next year: April 5-April 7, 2012!

Billie Letts signs books for her many fans.

It's On!

2011-03-31T09:30:00.014-05:00

As of 9:30 this morning, March thirty-first, 2011, the Sixth Annual the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is under way!

If you are attending the Festival and have heard you something you like, please leave a comment here so that the authors and everyone else can know what you think. Just click on the comment button below to leave a comment and read the comments left by others.

Welcome to Scissortail, 2011

2011-03-28T08:32:00.000-05:00

Dear Authors and Guests of the 6th Annual Scissortail Festival,

Lately I’ve been reading Shinkichi Takahashi’s Triumph of the Sparrow. Many of his poems were influenced by Dadaism, in part, a protest against the barbarism of war and other absurdities. In his search for something beyond the follies all around us, Takahashi unites this artistic movement with zen and is thus able to penetrate the soul of his readers, uniting them with the bliss of nature or the marvels of the everyday. As I prepare for our 6th annual Scissortail festival, I feel more than ever, a desire based in a deep need, to gather together as writers, as readers, as co-participants in the search for the peaceful soul, somehow ordered by the pursuit of art. So much does not make sense around us, and in our ever-fragmented world, marred by misuse of technology and shallow forays into pretense and simplistic solutions, we need to rendezvous, we need to be inspired, we need to listen to the soul seeping through the words of our fellow creators among us.

Welcome back to Ada and to East Central University. To the first-timers, we hope you discover the worthwhile endeavor of listening to each other, beyond ego and apart from a craving for petty dominance. To the returners, it is always great to see you again, to hear of your progress, to feel how words are shaping you at this time of your life.

Many have volunteered time and effort to make this event possible. I thank them as I thank authors and guests for traveling to Ada to be part of this good gathering of folks. To the festival!

Ken Hada, Director
March 28, 2011

Winners of the 7th Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

2011-03-09T09:05:00.004-06:00

Congratulations!

Fiction Winners
First Place : Erika Salmon. “The Soldier.” Tahlequah High School
Second Place: Paige Warren. “Stolen.” Norman North High School
Third Place: Kayla Crego. “Eight Arms to Hold You.” Norman North High School

Fiction Winners Honorable Mentions:
Lindsey Weir. “Alone at Night.” Westmoore High School
Kaitlyn Hawk. “A Horrible and Tragic Tale.” Coalgate High School
Rajat Ghosh. “Barrier.” Norman North High School
Shelby Seaquist. “Flowers and a Feather.” Pryor High School
Shealy Davis. “Bridge of Fear.” Strother High School
Kathryn Shauberger. “Neighborly Duties.” Norman North High School
Zach Shaffer. “The Awakening.” Tahlequah High School
Isabelle Gronlund. “Pictures of Ash.” Norman North High School
Lucy Mahaffey. “Shout.” Norman North High School
Samantha Jo Smith. “Katie.” Collinsville High School

Poetry Winners
First Place : Kenna Stanton, “To Set The Table” Lawton High School
Second Place: Chelsea Elam, “Hotel Room” Norman North High School
Third Place: Arthur Dixon, “Sheets and Blankets” Ardmore High School

Poetry Winners Honorable Mentions:
Anna Marie Saunders, “Tribute to Kathryn” Edmond Memorial High School
Shelby Talley, “ Miss Mae” Coalgate High School
Sarah Capps, “The Geisha” Norman North High School
Cheyenne H. Ballard, “Wilt of the Rose” Shawnee High School
Casey Cowan, “In life we yearn to find” Heavener High School
Nicole Roten, “The Dust Bowl,” Lawton High School
Katie Hill, “Sandcastles,” Norman North High School
Aubrey Mackey, “Aunt Lois’s Bible” Coleman High School
Karen L. Longo, “Rose” Broken Bow High School
Ninoshka Rivera-Roldan, “Mystified Nature” Lawton High School

2011 R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest -- First Prize in Fiction

2011-03-09T09:04:00.002-06:00

The Soldier
by Erika Salmon, Tahlequah

I was four years old and Maggie thirteen when we made the journey together from Paddington Station. It was July of 1940. Since we went to our grandparents’ country estate in Kent nearly a year after the Blitz, from that point on most of my childhood memories are pleasant. Along with the Anderson shelter, the constant worries about air raids were left behind in London, and life settled. We attended the small school a mile from the house. The first few weeks, I woke up every night crying for home and mum. I sniffled into my pillow until Maggie came to comfort me. It was five more years before, in May of 1945, we returned home.

While Maggie and I have had our disagreements, we agree on one thing without a shadow of a doubt: that what changed our lives most during the war was not being evacuated—we were fortunate to stay with our grandparents, not strangers. It was not the air raids. Unlike countless other families, our father came back to a still standing home after the war. It was not the rationing. The farm produced plenty. It was not even living without our parents for a large part of our childhoods. Whatever else from my youth is lost from my memory, I will never forget February 23, 1942, a turning point in my life.

I sat crisscross in the grass, leaning forward with my elbows on the porch. At nine years old, I knew what eavesdropping was. In my opinion, this didn’t qualify at all.

Neil, one of the soldiers camping in my Gran’s sitting room, sat quietly beside my sister. Maggie’s wool sweater was caught on the splintery back of the bench. My legs itched. The grass poked my legs between my darned socks and skirt. I tried not to scratch.

“Maggie?” said Neil.

I looked up at the back of Neil’s head.

“There’s something I’ve got to show you.” I tried to picture his expression.

I thought Maggie wasn’t going to answer, she was quiet for so long. Then she spoke softly.

“It’s the pictures, isn’t it?” Maggie asked.

I looked up again and saw him nod. I heard the crinkle of paper.

“It might frighten you,” Neil paused, “but it’s true.”

Maggie swallowed.

“These and who knows how many other people lived it, or are living it.”

I heard a shaky breath from Maggie. Who’s living what?

Neil leaned back, and the bench creaked. “It’s all a hundred time worse than anything I’ve seen.” He shook his head. “I thought being a medic, I’d seen everything.”

“This morning,” there was a small catch in Maggie’s voice, “we stopped by the news agent as usual. I picked up that copy,” she pointed at the rolled up magazine in his hand. “Gran picked one up too, and before I’d turned the front page, she told me to put it down. It’s the article, and the pictures. I just know it.” She sniffed.

Neil pulled a small scarf from his army blouse pocket and put it in Maggie’s hand. “Thank you.” Her nose was slightly stopped up, so it sounded more like, “Dankyoo.” She blew her nose. “I hear talk here and there at the green grocer’s and from some of the older girls at work, but never from my mum or my aunt in their letters. Gran never talks about it. Nor does Granddad, especially because of Frances, I think.”

Me? What didn’t Granddad want me to know?

“Your family cares so much,” Neil sighed, “but I don’t think you can live in this era not knowing what a few people’s hatred is doing to millions. When I saw these photographs and read the article, I realized what happens when people become proud, and when they start to see others as inferior. This is what people are capable of.” He shook the magazine lightly.

Capable of what?

“Men like Hitler and Mussolini,” Neil said, “let those ideas grow and grow.

A breeze cut through the yard, and I tugged my jumper closer.

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These pictures left me speechless,” Neil unrolled the magazine.

Maggie gripped the scarf so tight her knuckles whitened. “I should...I should know. I’m old enough.” I stretched my neck and caught a glance before Maggie leaned to look and blocked my view. It was an issue of LIFE magazine with a picture of soldiers marching across the cover.

Again I was tempted to come out of hiding, so I could see what all this was about. If Maggie was old enough, so was I. I started to get up, when Maggie took in a sharp breath and turned her head away. I froze. She turned to look again, covering her mouth with one hand and squinting. Like what I did when I watched Grandad clean a fish but was afraid to look. Maggie shook her head and gave a muffled moan. She turned away with her hand still clamped over her mouth and whimpered, shaking her head.

I sank down. Maybe I didn’t want to see it anymore.

“Ay, Maggie,” Neil said softly. He tucked away the magazine and put an arm around Maggie’s small, trembling shoulders. “Ay.”

I curled up small so he wouldn’t see me, but he wasn’t looking where I was. I leaned my head against the porch and watched them from below.

Maggie was still shaking, so he put his other arm around too. She pressed her face into his sleeve the way I cried on Gran’s shoulder. I didn’t know what had upset her. I hoped Neil would fix it. But he didn’t say it would be all right.

I watched a cloud disappear over the house, listening to the quiet.

“Bad isn’t it?” Neil asked.

“I won’t be able to get those pictures out of my mind. Just looking at them is undignified. I-I don’t want to believe it’s real.”

“Some don’t.”

Sloshing water and the clink of Gran’s blue willow china rang through the kitchen window. That was the only sound for a while. I pulled my knees up to my chest and waited. An engine rumbled to life in the front lawn. It must’ve been one of the army jeeps.

“I guess things like this are why my lot are in this war.”

“You’re all so brave.” Maggie’s voice, though quiet, had lost its shakiness.

Neil took his beret from the bench and hung it on his knee. “To give one person his life back, someone else has to risk his. You leave a life behind, a family behind. Everybody does in war.”

I nudged the fallen nut with my shoeless toe as I thought about it. The nut traveled in circles in front of me.

Maggie breathed deeply, “Who did you leave behind?”

“Friends, though I’ve made new ones. Parents. You can’t get new parents.”

I thought about Mum and Aunt. Of course I remembered them. Yet lately they seemed more like the mum and aunt of a friend or from a story, not my own family.

“Do you ever wonder what you’d be doing if you weren’t fighting in the war?”

“Oh, I’d still be working on my mum and dad’s farm in Somerset.”

I’d never been to Somerset.

“They must miss you. How long’s it been since you’ve seen your mum and dad?”

My dad’d tucked me in before he left. That night was so far back in the past.

“Nearly…two years,” Neil said.

“They must be proud. It’s silly,” Maggie chuckled, “but sometimes I ask myself if I would go or stay if I were asked to join. My parents sent me as far from it as they could.”

I tried to imagine Maggie in Dad’s uniform.

“Actually, they weren’t so keen on me going,” Neil fidgeted. “They would’ve kept me home till I was eighteen if I…um, hadn’t...”

“Hadn’t what?”

I held my breath.

Maggie sounded puzzled. “Hang on. I thought minimum age is eighteen.”

I considered leaving, but even the giant crunch of leaves underfoot in my imagination were too loud. Besides, there was a large window looking out from the parlor where the soldiers were staying, and someone would tell.

“I lied. To the recruiters, about my age. And to my parents, about minimum age,” he sighed.

Maggie looked at him. He moved his beret to his other knee. Suddenly, his uniform was too wrinkly for his taste, and he patted out the creases and straightened his collar.

“How old were you?” Maggie smiled a little.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he hunched down, and I had to strain to catch his words, “but legally, I couldn’t have signed up until this past June.”

They stared at each other for a long time. Then Maggie fell back and let out a breath through pursed lips. Neil put a finger to his lips.

“I’m ashamed about lying,” he sighed and leaned forward, elbows on his spread knees, “but I’m not sorry to be here. I’m these blokes’ only medical help, and I have been for a while.”

“Sixteen and in the army. Had you any medical schooling before you joined?”

Neil curved his fingers and thumb in a zero. “Little, aside from helping my dad, who’s a veterinarian. I joined as a stretcher-bearer but sort of had to pick up the medic job.”

Maggie sighed, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I know. But I’m glad to be here now.”

“Now I’m not sure if that was really brave or really stupid.” She propped her elbow on the seat back and leaned her face on her fist. “Two years too young with no training. Pretty brave and really stupid.”

“Oy, cheers,” Neil said. “I get the hint.” He stood, boots echoing in the porch. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. Goodbye.”

I caught myself before I laughed.

Maggie sat up. “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that.”

I rolled my eyes. She always took a while to catch on.

“Oh, it’s all right. You can admit it’s a bother having me here.” He was grinning as he turned to go.

“Wait!” Maggie grabbed his coat sleeve. “Believe me, Neil.” She shook his arm. “I don’t want you to leave. Don’t.”

Neil bent to pick up his fallen hat, and when he looked up at her wrinkled brows and the tear track down her cheek, he sank down to eye level with her. I think all three of us forgot to breathe.

It is then that my sister’s and my version of the story diverge. According to her, I ruined a moment by gasping. Of course, I did no such thing. But from that point on, our views cannot be reconciled. At seven years of age, I had my own idea of what Maggie and Neil’s future would be. If things had gone my way, Neil never would have left. At the very least, they would have reunited after the war and married. I didn’t mind the thought of being an aunt soon after that.

Although they never married each other or anyone else, I knew from the ever-increasing tower of letters and the always stocked folder of pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes in my sister’s room that there was no one either cared more for. Maggie sometimes received two letters a week from him when the postal system was up and running properly again. We both cried when Neil left to go back to Somerset after the war. He told the truth to his parents, at last, and rather belatedly asked their forgiveness. He worked on the farm a year until his parents moved to a suburb of London. Then he went on to be a horse doctor and a part-time traffic conductor there, so he could be near his mother, who had as great a claim on him as my sister. Maggie and I were reunited to our own parents though neither of us lived near them. Maggie traveled Europe, devoting her life to caring for survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Though a picture may not procure a thousand words, it can inspire a life’s work.

As for me, it is a longstanding joke within our family that, because I couldn’t stand the part about Maggie not marrying a soldier, I did it instead. On my twenty-first birthday, I had my wedding in my Gran and Grandad’s Kent country estate I remember so well. My mother and aunt both cried when my father, home safe from the war, gave me in marriage to a veteran soldier, a paratrooper whose gentleness outweighed his soldier’s build and matched his quiet deep voice. He often told me how much it meant to him that I understood the human capacity for evil and the soldier’s conviction to fight against it. I cannot take the credit for knowing that one person’s freedom is purchased by another’s freedom, or even life. It is to an underage, untrained medic whose story I should not have heard that I owe my thanks.

2011 R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest -- Second Prize in Fiction

2011-03-09T09:03:00.002-06:00

뺐어: Stolen

by Paige Warren, Norman North

Mid-west North America
2010

Her eyes were amber. That was the first thing I remembered after waking. Sun’s deep, screaming eyes—once so proud but timid now—woke me from dreams and brought me back here to this place called reality—or whatever it was. The fear and uncertainty hardly hidden amongst her crying eyes and the far away expression painted in every feature of her face was what shook me awake from the darkness of inexorable sleep. The moment our eyes met, Sun’s disheveled appearance confirmed what my subconscious had been trying to tell me all along: we had been lost—or worse—stolen.

“Where are they taking us?” Sun looked at me with such dignity in her glossy eyes, amidst all the tears. My thoughts flickered to the clouded scenes of home: the perfect coastal town of Haenam was barely held together in my mind—I could remember the pristine ocean waves and the mix and match of traditional and modern Korean homes but all the faces of the many I loved were scarred by my inability to remember the last time I saw all of them.

Sun’s fingers prodding into my arm brought me back to the present. “Gwenchan-ah —are you okay, Jin-Sung— gwenchan-ah?”

“Just think of a far away place,” I whispered to her. There was a slight pause in my voice before I muttered, “think of home.” I felt her head collapse onto my shoulder as her grip on my arm tightened.

“I’m too afraid. What if we never… what if—” a girl sitting across from us kicked at Sun’s bare foot.

“Don’t even mention it.” The girl’s stern eyes were hard to make out in the darkness of the trailer. But we could all hear the hardness in her voice, the bitterness. Everyone hushed up after what she had said. It was on all of our minds: the warm, fading memories of our jip—home, the great, almost painful desire for kimchi and rice, and a soft yo to sleep on. My eyes sought out the twenty or so girl faces, some with prepubescent features. Others—like me and Sun—had the hint of what a mature woman’s features could look like. All faces of Korea: all faces, regardless of their beauty or childish smugness, wearing from this new reality of ours.

I glimpsed the glow of pale faces, scarred with dirt and oil. Others were of a more olive skin tone, like that of Sun and me. Some girls had almond-shaped eyes, others shone with the color of chocolate. Despite the fact that I didn’t possess desirable eyes or pale skin, or the fact that some girls were more chesty than others—despite all our differences—we all had one thing in common: we were all dragged from our homes with only the clothes on our backs and nothing protecting the soles of our feet.

Haenam, South Korea해남, 한국
2008

Each child, kneeling in a row, rested their hands against the windowsill, their heads on each other’s shoulder. I took joy in the fact that each one of them found entertainment purely in watching the happenings of every day life in Haenam: passersby coming and going, weary travelers on the way to the local hostel, farmers hauling an abundance of their crops—anything ranging from sweet potatoes to cabbage. I also took joy in the fact that today was Saturday: no field work, no school, and time to study—quietly today, thanks to my siblings’ sudden interest in what must be the fascinating routines of farmers and shop owners.

I had been peacefully working out some figures in my head when from one of my younger sisters, Jin-Kyong, a squeaky “unnie!” cut the silence. I turned to her, in the middle of solving a perfectly confusing equation, frustrated at her interruption. I gave her a stern look, hushed her, and finished my figuring. “Unnie, unnie!” She squealed again, tugging at my sleeve. “Look out the window!”

“I’m sure that whatever is out there isn’t much more fascinating than these math figures—” It was Jin-Kyong’s turn to give me a stern eye, pulling me to the window more forcefully this time.

“Really, unnie, look!” I looked out the screen window, joining my siblings on their knees, trying to find out exactly what was so mind-boggling to observe outside of this window.

“Uh-dee—where?” I scanned my eyes across the foreground of our front garden. Nothing.

“There.” My sister said sternly, prodding her finger out towards what seemed to be a girl my age dressed up as fashionably as I had ever seen in this part of Korea. Her dark hair was tucked back into a neat roll atop her head, the sun revealing glints of red shimmering strands blending in with the rest of the darkness. Her outfit wasn’t merely made up of a school uniform—the hems of her skirt dawned white lace against the darkness of the navy cotton. Her suit jacket was fit perfectly to her form, hugging every inch of her body where it needed to. This was unlike most school girls—unlike the way that the oversized jackets enveloped their small bodies, making them seem even tinier than they actually were. And the darkness of her jacket didn’t make her appear somber and bored like it did on me. This girl was either wealthy or she knew how to dress well—considering she came to Haenam, I inferred the latter.

The sudden laughing of the party surrounding the girl lit up my siblings’ eyes—and I would judge mine as well. We were drawn into this world outside our window. We were fascinated by any kind of newcomer who stayed more than a minute in our humble town. As the laughing continued, the curves of the girl’s cheeks had a charming effect when she smiled, the petals of them becoming rosy as she spoke with a certain, high-pitched voice. Everyone around her kept an easy aura, touching her shoulder as if they had known her forever when it was obvious that she had only just arrived. She really was charming.

“Noo-goo-ya?—Who is she?” I heard myself ask, unaware of the words falling out of my lips.

“From what we’ve heard, she is a student and her parents are coming here to set her up with a match-maker. She is quite pretty, isn’t she?” Jin-Kyong questioned. I simply nodded, staring at this foreign beauty far from my windowsill, where I knelt, merely a head taller than my siblings, joining in their amusement. “Her name is Sun,” my sister said.

I nodded to myself again.

“Yeh-peu-dah,” I whispered. Beautiful.

Mid-west North America
2010

The doors burst open to the trailer, yet still with the absence of light. The same two Korean men who had dragged me and Sun away from Haenam were standing outside the doors of the trailer now, their ugly, dark faces pockmarked and grimacing. Their eyes were just as lifeless as they had been when they took us. All of us girls had the same reaction to the men: we all flinched at the mere sight of them, each one of us reliving the nightmare of being stolen from everything we had known. I felt Sun’s body close to mine, her fear audible in the quivering of her shallow breaths. As much as I felt the need—the obligation—to protect Sun, I couldn’t take my eyes off of those men, fearing that they would pounce on me as soon as I did.

They didn’t say a word at first. Rather, one of the men kept staring us down with his threatening eyes and just by the look of him, I knew something horrific would happen if we tried to escape. I’m sure the thought passed through each of us, our souls hungry for the chance of hope waiting outside this trailer. But all of us knew better; none of our starved bodies could take this large Korean man—big enough to easily pin at least four of us down at a time. The other man, smaller but his body still just as cruel, was motioning forward someone else who remained out of sight. “Come, please come,” he said in Korean, the frustration in his voice apparent. Or perhaps that was just the way he talked.

“Noogoo?” Sun’s broken voice managed to whisper. I merely shook my head, unable to see much more than she could. But after the word slipped out of Sun’s mouth and the large man moved his boorish eyes towards us, a white man appeared beside him. Dark, scruffy hair covered him in what seemed to be every place possible. He tried to look civilized by dressing in a charcoal suit with sharp shoulders and suspenders hidden underneath the jacket. Topped off with a battered, drab hat, his outfit reminded me of an overcast day—everything was gray, as if he had jumped right out of a black and white TV. Everything about this man caught me off guard—I had only seen a few white people at home in Haenam, mostly tourists. This man was a completely different story. This man was here either to barter our way out of this mess—or much, much worse: get us deeper into the mess he had possibly been the one to make for us. Judging on his appearance, I could only assume it would be for the worse.

The man nodded at the two Korean men, speaking words in English that merely sounded like gibberish to me. “He is speaking English..?” What was intended as a statement took the form of a question as the words stammered from Sun’s mouth.

“Can you understand him?” I questioned her, her lips tightening as she pulled her hair behind her ears.

“I didn’t get that far in English lessons at school… You know I was behind since we moved to Haenam.” She seemed determined though, as attentive as I had seen her since we had been taken. Although her eyes scanned the faces of these men with scrutiny, she appeared to me as an extremely wilted flower—still so beautiful with her wide eyes and thick, black-red hair, but weathered from the elements that had been forced upon her.

“Sun, you know English—” She cut me off with a tap of her hand on my head, hushing me.

“Shshh, let me try to hear what they’re saying.”

I obeyed, hearing only gibberish from the man’s foreign voice, one hand rubbing against his wristwatch, the other against his fat belly. He nodded to the small Korean man, addressing him as “Mr. Noh.” Mr. Noh was obviously stumbling while he tried to speak English, his voice fumbling over words and tones. While he tried to work out the words in his head, the white man rolled his eyes over to us, the blackness of them passing over every single girl, as if he were judging us in some kind of competition. His gaze was ominous and dreadful. Mr. Noh whipped around to him, finally having gathered his words. He merely nodded until Mr. Noh had finished speaking. Then, with a hint of power, the white man pointed at one girl after the next, prodding with not only his fingers but also his words.

“What is he saying, Sun? What is he saying?” The man’s menacing power worried me sick. The fact that I couldn’t understand what his intentions were was even more agonizing. Sun looked at me with a nauseas look on her face, her olive cheeks flushing red.

“The white man says… almost every one of us will do. Perhaps not the pair of five year olds, he says. They look too sick. The white man says…” Sun hesitated, her head shaking in horror. I grasped her hands, trying to comfort her with what warmth I could give.

“Sun, Sun, Sun,” I whispered, tracing the tears escaping on her cheeks with my finger. “Sun?”

“The white man says… the men will love us.”

Haenam, South Korea해남, 한국
2008

Sun had always been with me, wherever I went. Whether it was to feed the blazing flames of our competition against one another or because we both knew, underneath the façade of striving to overachieve and to appear perfect to everyone around us, we had something special. There was no denying this anyhow. During the years of our competition, Sun always kept her eyes diligently on whatever prize was before her: success in her studies, impressing the teachers, winning against me, even. She seemed so perfect with her success and beauty, yet she harbored this intense desire to overachieve, to gain and devour everything in her sight, even if that meant losing everything she loved.

Today was dark in Haenam, with clouds covering the sky. Yet patches of sun flitted down across the ocean, shining on the waves so pristinely. That’s what Haenam always thrived upon—the water. It rained every once in a while, refreshing the crops and the field workers from the blazing mid-day sun. The rain restored all kinds of life here.

As I walked across the edge of the water after school had let out, I admired the trees that scanned the line of the beach. The trees provided the kids too young to work a place to daydream, a castle in the sky to climb. They provided the cleansing sound of fresh leaves tangling together in the wind. I could feel the crisp wind nipping at my face, but a sudden spray from the ocean caught me off guard. As I reached to my face to wipe away the saline drops of water, I took my attention off the ocean long enough to notice Sun walking barefooted across the shore in her school uniform, her lacey blue skirt rippling in the wind, her shoes dangling by her fingers. She stared out towards the water, a deep look of melancholy painted across her face. Neither of us had realized it but we had both been gradually taking steps toward each other, our minds and eyes too busy focusing on the violent motions of the waves in the wind.

I was hesitant to say anything, although I wanted to. Would she even know who I was? But the pulsing articulation of my heart was too overpowering to ignore. I had to go with my heart on this one—I had to say something.

“Sun?” I called out, unsure of anything. Her eyes caught mine and for a second, I could have sworn I saw a hint of recognition in them.

“Yes?” She called back, an awkward smile spreading across her mouth. She seemed just as uncertain as my voice felt.

“My siblings—I—well, you see,” I took a subconscious step forward as I searched out for the words. The confusion in her eyes was clear yet she held her façade, her smile still wound tightly into her features, her amber eyes light with the reflection of what was left of the setting sun. “You’re new here, aren’t you?” My voice shook, finally managing to come up with the right words, never mind that they were as awkward as could be.

“Yes, I am,” she responded slowly. “We attend the same school, yes?” I merely nodded back. “Jin-Sung, isn’t it?” I nodded again, staring at my bare feet. After a few seconds of silence, I looked up to find Sun standing much closer to me. “You want to know all the gossip about me.” What should have been a question came out as an abrupt statement. “You want to know why I’m here of all places. I get that, I do. I’m surprised you don’t know already. Gossip in towns like this get around fast. I guess I should tell you, shouldn’t I?” She smirked, a wild look of mischief trying to cover the look of sorrow that clearly came through her body language.

“No, no, it’s not that—” I protested, but Sun persisted.

“I might as well. You’re the last person in practically all of Haenam to not know.” Her insistence confused me. The fact that this girl before me, whom I was dying to know about, was willing to come straight out with the truth about her life was stunning to me—I had never met someone like this. Sun was something else; she was someone rare.

“You really don’t have to tell me,” I exclaimed, hoping the genuineness of my voice would come through to her, across the wind that separated us. Sun’s hair whipped away in the breeze, concealing her eyes if only for a few seconds. She looked up from beneath the sweep of her dark bangs, and nodded. Before I could say anything else, she sat down on the sand, looking up at me expectantly. There was something about the vulnerability in her eyes that made me feel obligated to sit with her. At the start of that moment, I felt the urge to protect her from the wind. At times she looked so fragile that the wind could pick her up and sweep her away at any moment’s notice. I sat beside her, resting my elbows on top of my knees as I dug my toes into the sand.

“My appa—my father—his parents died a year ago, leaving him with a hefty inheritance. We used only a little of it to come here to Haenam. And my appa, well he came here to set me up with a match-maker. It’s a bit traditional, I know,” she said, scrunching her nose. “But I’m set to marry a ‘fine young man,’ a man who ‘will provide for our family.’” Sun sighed, her fingers scratching at her legs, the true hue of them hidden beneath her dark tights. “The mayor’s son.”

I knew whom she was talking of. I’d never met him in person but he was supposed to be brilliant—an excellent chemist as well as a virtuoso violinist. He was four years our senior. “Well, that’s good, right?” I tried to keep the tone of my voice light.

“Sure, I guess. I just wanted to marry for… well, love.” Sun’s voice broke on the word, her head bobbing with the wind. “It’s just unfair, you know?” As Sun stared across the ocean once more, I nodded to myself in agreement knowing perhaps exactly how she felt.

Mid-west North America
2010
After Sun had explained to all of the girls what exactly those men had forced us into, silent tears poured down each of our cheeks. Perhaps the darkness in each one of us came out that night, the sorrow of the whole situation overwhelming us. Sun’s hand didn’t leave mine all night, her sweaty grip getting tighter as the cries persisted. If there were living hells in each of us, this was it. The only hope I could find in this was the fact that Sun was by my side through it all.

Sun turned towards me, her eyes blazing with something other than tears.

“I’m glad I have you, Jin-Sung. I’m glad you called out to me that day on the beach. I’m glad you became my friend that day.”

I didn’t understand her logic whatsoever. Wherefore would she choose me?—this sad, haunted whelp of a girl. Why did she choose me for competition? How was it that we found each other in the midst of all this chaos? I was unable to speak through my tears, the weight of them taking a hold of me. Sun sank into me and as I held her in my arms, I pondered all this, simply asking the gods wherefore they had planned our coming together. If I believed this was our fate, then who was to say that our fate wouldn’t turn out grim? Who was to say we would ever get back to Haenam? If this was our destiny, our fate, I decided that every moment I had left with Sun I would live as if it were my last because the truth of the matter was that it very well could be and I might never see those beautiful amber eyes again.

* * *

A violent pounding at the trailer door woke me from a light sleep. Sun bounded up at the sound of it, her fingers still tight around mine. A muffled, drunken voice echoed through the cracks of the door.

“Open up, you whores!” The doors were thunderously barged open, the light of the stars giving us vision if only for a second. The drunken man was Mr. Noh, stumbling as he jumped up and into the trailer. A gold pad lock was gripped tightly in his hands as he banged shut the door behind him. He shoved the pad lock across the door handles and locked it, stuffing the key into his dirty pants. As Mr. Noh turned to face us, there was a great unison yelp from each one of us as he fell over onto the piles of skinny girl legs overlapping one another, just barely missing my own pair of legs. I jumped at the sight of Mr. Noh’s face inches away from me, his bloodshot eyes staring up at me chillingly. He got to his knees, and frantically began unbuttoning his pants. As if on instinct, my eyes brewed with tears and there was no hesitance for them to spill out. I pushed Sun out of the way with all the strength I could muster as the man yanked my wrists towards him. As soon as Mr. Noh’s pants were off, he forced my shoulders down against the floor of the trailer, the cold metal jutting into my back. I shook my head violently, as if to ward off the truth of what was about to happen to me. I heard Sun give out a cry of agony. The man merely flung his pants at her.

Mr. Noh ripped off what little clothing I had on, and pressed his body down on mine anxiously. I wanted to scream but my voice felt completely dry from all the tears that were flooding my cheeks.

“Jin-Sung.” I heard my name and tried to shift my head so that I could see where the sound was coming from. The man was so absorbed in what he was doing that he didn’t notice. I was almost blind from the tears that I couldn’t see Sun’s terrified eyes staring down at me. “Jin-Sung.” She said again. This time her lips matched what I was hearing. She held up the man’s pair of pants in one hand, a gold metal key in the other. My eyes immediately widened, both to fight off the tears and to see more clearly what Sun held in her hand. My mouth opened as if to cry out to her but no words came out. Mr. Noh smothered his face on mine. I couldn’t breathe. I felt a part of me was dying. And there was nothing I could do.

After the man lifted his face from mine, he closed his eyes. I had never felt such greater pain in my life. I tried to look around the man to partly see that the trailer door was slightly open, Sun kneeling near it with the key clutched tightly in her hand. The youngest girls of the bunch were crawling out of the trailer as quickly and quietly as they could. The man was breathing so heavily that I don’t think he could have heard even if he were sober. After two more girls climbed out, Sun looked up to see me watching her. She was sobbing silently, her chest heaving up and down heavily.

“Gah—go.” I mouthed silently, the tears inescapable as Mr. Noh’s weight still pinned me down. Sun shook her head violently. “Gah!” I mouthed again, knowing I would beg if I could. Suddenly, the man had finished and was lifting his weight off of me. There was no time.

Sun looked at the key and searched around the faces near her that were retreating to their original spots, knowing the man would turn around any second. Sun handed the key to the first pair of hands she could find, not saying a word, but looking the girl sternly in the eyes. As the man was fumbling around for his pants, Sun leapt out of the trailer and closed the door behind her.

Haenam, South Korea해남, 한국
2009

“Jin-Sung!” Sun was running at me, her eyes flowing with tears. Her cries were inaudible as the waves picked up with the violence of the wind. I caught her in my arms as she flung herself toward me. “Jin-Sung!” She sobbed, her lacy skirt flying up in the wind.

“Gwenchan-ah? Slow down, Sun.” The waves subsided if only for a second. I pulled her down to the sand, sitting her down by the water. That’s when she began pouring it all out.

“Appa—his money ran out.”

Not quite catching the drift of what she was saying, I took her hands and patted her soft skin. “It’s only normal, Sun. Plenty of families don’t keep track of their inheritance and start overspending—”

“No,” she said, her eyes wider than ever. “His money ran out before we even came to Haenam. Umma told me today.” This was news to me. But I kept my mouth shut, knowing surely this was going somewhere else…

“We came here because we had no money left. Because appa knew that word hadn’t got out yet and there would still be hope for our family’s reputation here. And that hope was lying in the chance that he could marry me off to some rich boy.” Sun sputtered out coughs as I realized the tide had caught up with us. We moved back a few strides, safe from the current that could soak our school clothes.

When Sun caught her breath, she continued, “And the mayor finally found out. So the whole thing’s off. My family’s reputation is ruined and we won’t have any more money. And I won’t have to marry the mayor’s son.” Remembering our first meeting when Sun shared her dream of love with me, I was perplexed.

“Then why are you crying?” I asked. She looked up at me, her face dampened with tears and the saline of the ocean spray. There was deep confusion in her eyes.

“What are you saying—what—” She shook her head vehemently.

“Don’t you remember, Sun? We were here, merely a year ago, when you told me that you wanted to marry for love?” There was light in her eyes now but as soon as it appeared, it quickly faded away as the waves roared louder and closer to us.

“But I’ll have to quit school—my family… they won’t have any money to put me through the rest of the term.”

“But you’ll have your dream. You’ll find love. Isn’t that what mattered to you a year ago? Does it matter to you now?” My questioning left her speechless. A minute later, I felt her hands grip tightly to mine. Her amber eyes shone with that light that made my heart beat faster.

“You’re right,” she nodded. “Love is what matters.” A gradual smile tugged at her pale lips. “It’s what has mattered all along.”

Mid-west North America
2010

Mr. Noh hadn’t even noticed there were five of us missing. He hadn’t even gotten his pants all the way on before he had passed out, asleep and drooling in the corner of the trailer. All at once, the girls came towards me, their stunned eyes not daring to meet mine. They helped me put on my clothing as fast they could as a few others moved towards the girl who had the key. No one said anything, not wanting to risk waking the man. Once the girl had drawn out the key that Sun had bestowed her, we all made our way to the door in haste. The girl looked around at each one of us, with the key in hand, each girl taking a humble step toward me. The girl with the key was the first one to bow as she held the shiny metal out to me. Each girl, in turn, slowly bended their feeble bodies as their bows graced my feet. I took the key, nodding at the girls, my hands shaking as my fingers fumbled to keep my grasp on they key’s metal binding. My lungs breathed in what air I could manage as the girls thanked me silently with their humbled eyes, making way for me to get to the door.

I fumbled several times to get the pad lock open. I was as frightened as could be at the possibility of the man waking up again, ready to pounce on one of the girls, or me again. My hands were shaking as I stumbled to get the key in the lock. Once it was finally in, I turned it, a nervous sweat dripping across my brow. As soon as the lock was opened, I tore it off and pushed one door open, my jaw dropping at what I saw outside the trailer. Each girl gave a gasp as I saw the light of amber eyes once more.

Haenam, South Korea해남, 한국
2009

Sun’s arms were pulled tightly around my neck as the wind brushed her black-red hair against my face, her damp cheek pressing against mine. We didn’t say anything more as we watched the tide climb higher toward us, threatening to take us out to sea. The waves burst to life as the wind pushed harder and the ocean’s water tingled at our faces. There was a storm coming.

The clouds grew darker above the water, the smell of fresh rain lingering heavily on the air around us. The life of Haenam thrived on rain, just as the rest of civilization has and will. The many inches of rain that the gods have brought to Haenam have refreshed the crops and encouraged them to grow time and time again, in turn providing food for all of us—so that no one would ever go hungry. The rain has refreshed those who work in the fields, the farms, the sea—the ones who bring us that food, and has brought them relief from an otherwise merciless sun. The rain has restored every one of us and has allowed new life to grow. Sun and I will be no different—we will be restored from every drop of rain, just as each one before us has come to grow.

As the waves crash mightily before us, I hold on to Sun’s hands, feeling the warmth flow from each of us. Sun blinks suddenly, surprised by something wet dropping onto her eyelash. Her fingers brush her face, wiping the wetness away. She looks to me and smiles, with that light in her amber eyes. I feel my heart sing. The first drop of rain has come.

2011 R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest -- Third Prize in Fiction

2011-03-09T09:02:00.018-06:00

Eight Arms to Hold You
by Kayla Crego, Norman North

Doris loved the river like an old friend, and heard the trickling of water against rock as a melodic voice speaking in a language only she understood. When the river flooded, it was a quarrel, and the friends were treated with a mutual cold shoulder, and when waters receded and tempers cooled, friends forgave. The river was feisty, but generous, and Doris knew no greater joy than taking the short walk from her house with her husband, down a gently sloping path and past frolicking families to the water's edge. There she would sit on her favorite bench with a newspaper or paperback novel or whatever craft she felt best busied her hands while her husband fished or showed the local children his newest toy boat. They all called him “gramps,” though the couple, as far as anyone could tell, had no children or grandchildren. It had been sixteen months since Doris had been to the river.

Ira opened the front door of his house. He squinted at the cheerful sun, twinkling away as though all was well. He grumbled at it disapprovingly.

Clutching a newspaper and an unassuming brown paper sack, he began the arduous walk to the riverfront. Despite the inviting weather, the only other people he saw as he approached the shore were a couple of young teenagers, probably skipping school, gathered in a huddle and keeping relatively quiet as they shared a cigarette. Ira grumbled about hooligans and wrapped his shapeless, hand-sewed coat tighter around him.

Sitting on the bench, he set the newspaper down beside him, and opened up the paper bag. He pulled from it a sandwich, sloppily-made and divided in half, which he proceeded to stoically eat, eyes never leaving the water. Upon finishing the first triangular piece, the old man stopped and set the other aside. He then pulled two small stacks of crackers from the bag, and, like the sandwich, stowed the other portion. Mechanically and thoughtlessly, he followed this same procedure for a bunch of grapes.

Once, Doris went through a phase in which she wanted to learn the art of oil paints. For a few weeks, Ira carried an easel and a bag of paints and turpentine down to the river in addition to his fishing supplies, and Doris gleefully painted splotchy scenes of water running over stone and called her messy results “abstract impressionism” and Ira told her they were the finest works of abstract impressionism he had ever seen, and said seriously that Monet himself would be impressed.

Once she painted an octopus, her amateur hand rendering it almost unrecognizable, and jokingly referred to it as her self-portrait. She planned on painting over it with white, so as to recycle the canvas, but Ira insisted it hung in the living room with the rest of her works.

One of the teenagers looked up from their huddle. “Does that guy ever finish his lunch?”
“Nah. He eats half and then – watch.”

They watched as the old man slowly rose from his seat and carried his small pile of food to the water's edge. He bent over and gingerly floated the half-meal on the water, grapes balanced delicately on bread, and gave it a gentle push. He turned around and trudged back to the bench as the food slid clumsily down-stream before sinking in an ungainly matter.

“So, what, he feeds the fish everyday?”

“And then reads to them. Creeper.”

“Whatever happened to that lady? Bet he killed her. Bet she was jealous of his fish so he killed her.”

They turned once more into the huddle.

“Remember when he used to play with those boats?” The teenager stole a glance at the hunched figure of the old man, before adding in a hurried voice, “What a weird guy.”

“Kinda sad, if you ask me.”

There was a demure murmur of agreement in the group.

Ira opened the newspaper to the same page he always started with, the weather, and cleared his throat.

“Good morning.” Though his voice was lively and content, his grave posture did not change. “Today is Thursday, May 2nd. I miss you.” He paused, listening to the trickling water, and cleared his throat again. “It's going to be warm all of next week. Partly cloudy on Sunday.” Another pause. “Good, less kids here to bother you.”

He was aware that the hooligans had put out their cigarette and began ambling away, kicking pebbles and chatting nonchalantly, and he shifted his position on the bench, satisfied with his loneliness. He continued to read aloud, almost every page, even the funnies. He described every panel, and gave a weak chuckle at the punchline in one. Sometimes the obituary page was skipped; other times, it was read in a quiet voice through gritted teeth. Today, Ira moved on to cooking. “Oh, a recipe for cheesecake. I haven't had any since... well, nobody could compare. You know that.”

Once, Doris picked up a book about octopodes from the library. “Octopodes is the correct pluralization,” she had informed him enthusiastically. “It's Greek, not Latin.” She loved words, and learning, and eight-legged cephalopods. She mused about taking a road trip to the city to visit the zoo and see one, but they never got around to it.

The teenagers were restless in a way only a Thursday spent away from responsibilities can produce. They had smoked their last few cigarettes, and could not scrounge the change needed for a new pack.

They agreed on the lack of activities provided to them by their location, and the general uselessness of Thursdays in any location. It never occurred to them to return to school, because they were restless youth and restless youth could do better, honestly.

One of these teenagers, who thought himself (quite romantically) the most restless of all, mentioned the old man from the river. He had a big old house, right? Big old houses had tons of interesting things. That old guy would never notice if they just took a look inside.
There was a disconcerted shifting and mumbles of dissent. This reaction convinced the teenager that he was on to something.

“C'mon. We don't have to touch anything. Let's just go look around. Maybe he's got cool old weapons or something. Maybe tons of fish. Maybe his wife's dead body.”

The gang hesitated, then tentatively agreed that it was a great idea and they'd better go quick, before he finished reading his paper.

They had thought it a brilliant plan all along, really, because restless youth do not think about what sort of effect a home invasion might have on a sad old man.

Once, Doris and Ira had wanted a restless youth of their own. Doris loved the sense of adventure all children possessed, so they had a child. They devoted every second of their lives to doting on it, but the river wanted it more. After a few weeks of avoiding the water at all costs, and much to Ira's surprise, Doris eventually forgave her friend.

“Mother octopodes die shortly after their eggs hatch. I got so much more than I could have hoped for.”

Ira did not understand this outlook for a long, long time.

Every day for fifteen months, Ira struggled to find a way to say goodbye.

“Well. The sun's going down. And. Um. That's all of this newspaper. So. Bye. I love you. I miss you. Bye.” He picked up the newspaper and the empty brown sack. “See you tomorrow.”

The walk back up to the house was demanding, but different from the one in the morning. His brow was not quite as furrowed. His mind was empty of everything but the thought of laying in bed, waiting for sleep. It was what he most looked forward to.

A thin line of sunlight shone through the slightly ajar front door.

Immediately Ira's tired mind sprang into a sensation best described as panic. He ran up the steps of the porch and threw the door open the rest of the way. The room was empty, and though he strained, he heard no unfamiliar sounds. He warily advanced to the kitchen, doing his best to remain silent, and tossed the newspaper and paper bag into the recycling. His mind raced – had he left the door open on his way out? He never had before, it wouldn't make sense to make such a careless mistake all of a sudden.

Heaving a sigh, he gave up on speculating and climbed the stairs to his room. It was an old house. Maybe the lock needed to be replaced. He dreaded the thought of a trip into town to buy a new one – a day away from the river, just to buy a tool he wished he didn't need.

Only moments before he finally climbed into bed, there came a scuffling sound from downstairs.

The teenagers had experienced very little trouble coercing the old lock into surrendering. They pushed the door open and scampered like a pack of mischievous dogs into the front room, marveling at their own courage.

The house, they found, was very much like its owner – a grey version of its former self, waiting for some solid entity to fill the hole in its existence. The old man had not replaced any of the bulbs for months, so the only light in the house came through the windows, filtered by the thick cloud of dust that hung like makeshift curtains in the raspberry-colored light of the sunset.

They found their experience in the house mostly underwhelming. There were no weapons – Doris had passed her disapproval of these on to her husband – nor were there any corpses, of fish or wives or otherwise. There was mostly old pictures and knick-knacks arranged meticulously on even older-looking chests and shelves. Downstairs, there was the living room and the kitchen and an extra room, with sewing supplies, piles of cloth, and projects both well-worn and never finished on one side, and shelves of toy boats on the other.

The teenagers didn't have a chance to make their way up to the second floor before they heard the front door fly open and the mad tramping of the old man running into the house. They immediately went silent and looked at each other with wide, fearful eyes. Holding their collective breath, the sound of the old man crossing into the kitchen, then back across the house to the stairs and finally up into his bedroom seemed to last a lifetime.

When it was deemed safe, one of the teenagers nodded, and one-by-one they tiptoed out of the room, across the oh-so-creaky floor to the front door. Each sound seemed magnified one thousand times – the door hinges practically shrieked as the first of the boys slowly, deliberately turned the knob and pulled it open. The boys spilled out into the cool evening air, taking deep breaths as they scurried away from the house, none bothering to look back or check on his friends.

Each sound seemed louder, but the sound of the very last teenage boy tripping on a moth-ball of a rug and smacking hard on his elbows was loud enough.

This teenage boy recognized one of the toy boats. Several years ago, when he was small enough to admire teenage hooligans of the sort he had become, the boy's mother took him to the river for a few hours. There, he had frolicked with other children and ran entirely too far from his mother's sight, and happened upon an elderly couple, whom he bravely introduced himself to and interrogated innocently, as small children who stray from mother are wont to do.

The woman answered all of his questions and asked him even more and seemed genuinely delighted to meet the boy. The man was more soft-spoken, but did hesitantly offer the opportunity to cast a boat into the river, like a real captain.

The boy told his mother about the old couple and was chastised for putting himself in such a dangerous situation.

“You never know with strangers. Anyone could be bad. Anyone could be looking to hurt you.”
“No, Mom. They were good people.”

At the sudden sound from downstairs, Ira's tired joints suddenly awoke, and he found himself sprinting for the first time in years. The teenager scrambled to his feet and bolted for the exit, but not before Ira had bounded to the bottom of the stairs and leapt in front of the door.
“What are you doing in my house?!” The bellowing voice sounded strange to his own ears.
“Please don't hurt me!” was all the frightened boy could manage to reply.

Ira paused to consider this. “You break into the house of a weak old man and then act like a victim?” There was a hint of amusement underlying the weariness in his words.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Out of curiosity, what part of my behavior would suggest I was the sort of person likely to pull off such a stunt?” Ira recognized this boy as one of the hooligans from earlier. He did not recognize him as the inquisitive young boat captain from several years ago.

The reply was a meek question. “You killed your wife?”

A hollow laugh tumbled out of Ira like a limping dog. “That's cute, but Doris died in her sleep.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah.”

An awkward pause. “You should. Um. Take those boats to the river again.”

“Oh?”

“I – ahh, my, uh, brother... remembers when you used to do that. He thought it was cool. Why do you just go down there and read? And throw half a perfectly good meal away?” He thought, then added, “No offense.”

Ira pondered this. There was no way he could explain to this hooligan exactly what his motives were. Hooligans were incapable of comprehending such complex matters.

Sometimes, old men were too.

“Well, you know,” he finally replied. “There might be someone down there who appreciates it.” He glanced at the room with his boats. “Maybe I could dust one off sometime.”

The teenager nodded awkwardly, and Ira moved aside for him to pass. He muttered a final, sincere, “Sorry,” and shuffled through the door.

Once, a few weeks after their child had been lost in the river, Ira awoke Doris, who had been sobbing quietly in her sleep.

“What is it?” he asked. “What were you dreaming about?”

She wiped her face on the soft sheets and sniffled. “He was an octopus. In the river. He wanted to know why we never visited him. He said he was so hungry and lonely, and he wanted you to sail boats for him, and me to read to him, and...”

Ira wrapped her in his arms.

“... and he said one day we'd be together again.”

Ira hung Doris' oil painting of the octopus over his bed the day he came back from the hospital alone.

The teenagers questioned their friend, much in the same way a small child questions everyone outside of mother's sight. He refused to answer their intrusive, leading questions, and neither confirmed nor denied whether the man had seen him, beaten him, or tried to read him the news.
Finally, the teenagers agreed that, if nothing else, it was the most exciting Thursday any of them could remember. When one suggested the possibility of consequences as a result of their actions that day, another chimed in.

“Nah, listen. If word gets around, we'll just tell everyone the old guy threatened us, or, like, stole something. Or killed his wife. Whatever, y'know?”

“No.”

The teenagers looked at their friend, who had remained silent until this point, despite their frenzied questioning.

“Oh, c'mon, I know he probably made some crazy threats, but–”

The teenager shook his head. “No. You don't know.” His gaze turned sheepishly to the river, where the moon was casting long, tentacle-like shadows as it shone serenely through tree branches. “He was a good person.”

2011 Scissortail: Updated Schedule of Readings

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Rilla Askew (Photo by Ted Waddell)

Thursday, March 31

I. 9:30 - 10:45 Estep Auditorium

Shirley Hall – Broken Arrow, Oklahoma

from Listen

George McCormick – Cameron University

The Mexican

Ken Hada – East Central University

Going Backwards

II. 11:00 - 12:15 Estep Auditorium

Alan Barecka – Del Mar College

from Remembering the Body

Rilla Askew – University of Central Oklahoma

Your Granddaddy is a Felon .. And a Christian

Jim Spurr – Shawnee, Oklahoma

The 1940's and Thereabouts

*** Lunch ***

III. 2:00 - 3:15 Estep Auditorium

Jason Poudrier – Lawton, Oklahoma

In the Rubble at Our Feet

J. Don Cook, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Sublime, Absurd & Tragic

Ben Meyers – Oklahoma Baptist University

Elegy for Trains & other poems

IV. 3:30- 4:45 Estep Auditorium

Jane Vincent Taylor – Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Sonnets for Childhood

Jeanne Dunbar-Green – East Central University

Since It’s You and All

Arn Henderson

The Confessor & other poems

Susan Perabo

V. 3:30 - 4:45 North Lounge

Constance Squires – University of Central Oklahoma

from Red Queen Transcript

Jim Hunter – East Central University

Four White Stallions: Full Arrest

Hugh Tribbey – East Central University

Mime Box

*** Dinner ***

VI. 6:30 pm. Estep Auditorium

Featuring: Susan Perabo

*** Reception for Authors follows ***

@ Oak Hills Country Club

Friday April 1

VII. 9:00 - 9:50 Estep Auditorium

Dorothy Alexander – Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Family Love Story: Portrait of a Mother and Son

Bayard Godsave – Cameron University

la Revolution de Ventose

VIII. 9:00 - 9:50 North Lounge

Jim Wilson – Seminole State College

from The Journeyman

Tim Bradford – University of Central Oklahoma

from Nomads with Samsonite

IX. 10:00 - 10:50 North Lounge

John Rodwan - Portland, Oregon

The Fighting and Writing Life

Sandra Soli – Edmond, Oklahoma

Year of the Probable Boom

Jonis Agee

X. 10:00 - 10:50 Estep Auditorium

Carol Reposa, San Antonio, Texas

Target Practice & other poems

Paul Austin – Hartshorne, Oklahoma

A Not Famous Actor

XI. 11:00 - 12: 15 Estep Auditorium

Featuring Jonis Agee

*** Lunch ***

XII. 2:00 - 3:15 Estep Auditorium

Carl Sennhennn – Rose State College

An Irish Idyll

Hardy Jones – Cameron University

Every Bitter Thing

Steven & Regina Schroeder – Chicago & Boston

Only Gifts Changing Hands

XIII. 2:00 – 3:15 North Lounge

Elizabeth Raby – Santa Fe, New Mexico

This Dazzling Heartbreak

Jason Roberts – Oklahoma State University

Donovan

Jordan Jacobs – Lawton, Oklahoma

The Only Grace I Can Gather to Wake

XIV. 3:30 - 5:00 North Lounge

Abigail Keegan – Oklahoma City University

On Earth & other poems

Al Turner – Norman, Oklahoma

from Hanging Men & The World’s Worst Paper Boy

Phil Estes – Oklahoma State University

High Life

Carol Hamilton – Midwest City, Oklahoma

Umberto Eco Lost His Gun

XV. 3:30 - 5:00 Estep Auditorium

Joey Brown – Missouri Southern State University

Feral Love

E. K. Mortenson – Western Connecticut State University

The Fifteenth Station

Melissa Morphew – Sam Houston State University

Weeding Borges’ Garden

Robert Ferrier – Norman, Oklahoma

Sandplum & other poems

*** Dinner ***

Larry D. Thomas

XVI. 6:30 pm. Estep Auditorium

Featuring Larry Thomas

The 2nd Annual Page One Literary Art Gallery

*** and Wrap Party follows @ ***

Ada Arts & Heritage Center

*** The After Wrap ***

Vagrant plays Vintage 22

Saturday, April 2

XVII. 9:00 - 10:15 North Lounge

Nathan Brown – University of Oklahoma

Letters to the One-Armed Poet

James Brubaker – Oklahoma State University

Al’s Sound, Big as God: An Interview about Albert Ayler

Sarah Webb – Burnet, Texas

Beneath the Fields & other poems

XVIII 9:00 - 10:15 Estep Auditorium

Chuck Ladd – Southeastern Oklahoma State University

Reading Howard Starks

Andrew Terhune – Oklahoma State University

The Lord God is a Bird & other poems

Phil Morgan – Blanchard, Oklahoma

Anumpelichi, The Wordmaster

XIX. 10:30 - 11:45 North Lounge

Patrick Ocampo – Bartlesville, Oklahoma

A Stranger Everywhere & other poems

Tara Hembrough – John Logan College

The Abortion in the Bathtub

Dan Wilcox – Albany, New York

Sex, Death and Politics

Billie Letts (Photo by gracedbylight)

XX. 10:30 - 11:45 Estep Auditorium

Jennifer Kidney – Norman, Oklahoma

A Book of Days

John Morris – Cameron University

This Patched Town, This Home & other poems

Stephen Garrison – University of Central Oklahoma

from Revival

*** Lunch ***

XXI. 1:00 - 1:50 Estep Auditorium

Dean Rader – University of San Francisco

Works & Days

Ron Wallace – Southeastern Oklahoma State University

Oklahoma Cantos

XXII. 1:00 - 1:50 North Lounge

Karen Eileen Sisk – Oklahoma State University

Ruins

Karen Neurohr – Oklahoma State University

Through Okie Eyes: The Poetry of Wilma McDaniel

XXIII. Grand Finale - Billie Letts
& Winners of 7th Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

2:00 -3:00 pm Estep Auditorium

2011: Updated Author Biographies

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Jonis Agee was born in Omaha, Nebraska and grew up in Nebraska and Missouri, places where many of her stories and novels are set. She was educated at The University of Iowa (BA) and The State University of New York at Binghamton (MA, PhD). She is Adele Hall Professor of English at The University of Nebraska — Lincoln, where she teaches creative writing and twentieth – century fiction. She is the author of twelve books, including five novels — Sweet Eyes, Strange Angels, South of Resurrection, The Weight of Dreams, and her most recent, The River Wife — and five collections of short fiction — Pretend We've Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, Taking the Wall, and Acts of Love on Indigo Road. She has also published two books of poetry: Houses and Mercury. Agee's awards include ForeWord Magazine's Editor's Choice Award for Taking the Wall and the Gold Medal in Fiction for Acts of Love on Indigo Road; a National Endowment for the Arts grant in fiction; a Loft-McKnight Award; a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction; and two Nebraska Book Awards (for The Weight of Dreams and Acts of Love on Indigo Road. Three of her books — Strange Angels, Bend This Heart, and Sweet Eyes — were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Additionally, she has stories and essays in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. Finally, Jonis owns some twenty pairs of cowboy boots, some of them works of art, loves the open road, and believes that ecstasy and hard work are the basic ingredients of life and writing.

Dorothy Alexander is a poet, publisher, storyteller, and sort of an actress. From Cheyenne, Oklahoma, she is the co-owner of Village Books Press, a two-woman publishing house. Author of four collections of poetry: The Dust Bowl Revisited, Borrowed Dust, Rough Drafts, and the latest, Lessons from an Oklahoma Girlhood, a collection of art and poetry, she also writes non-fiction, has edited two collections of oral history in her home community in western Oklahoma, and was recently cast as the kindly (but eccentric) old woman, Ruther Rutherford, in Diane Glancy’s film, The Dome of Heaven, based on Glancy’s novel Flutie. Dorothy is currently at work on a memoir about her late son under the working title, The Boy Who Played Violin. In a previous life, she was an attorney and municipal judge for thirty-five years.

A fifth generation Oklahoman, Rilla Askew is the author of three novels and a collection of stories. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and has been selected for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Her first novel The Mercy Seat was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and received the Western Heritage Award and the Oklahoma Book Award in 1998. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2002 and was Oklahoma's One Book One State selection for 2007. Her most recent novel, Harpsong, was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize and received the Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, the Willa Cather Award from Women Writing the West, and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas. The recipient of a 2009 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Askew received her MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She has taught in the MFA Creative Writing Programs at Brooklyn College, Syracuse University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Central Oklahoma, where she currently serves as Artist in Residence. She is married to actor Paul Austin, and they divide their time between New York and Oklahoma.

Paul Austin’s professional life spans forty years plus and includes acting and directing On and Off Broadway, Off-Off Broadway, summer stock, and regional theaters around the nation, as well as acting for television and film, including roles on West Wing, Law and Order, Cosby, and the films, Palookaville, Thirteen Conversations, Tune in Tomorrow, and Sommersby. Among recent stage appearances were the Foreman in Vaclav Havel’s Audience and Late Night Conspiracies, a collection of his own writings at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, where he is a long time member. Mr. Austin has directed first productions of a number of new plays, including Percy Granger’s Eminent Domain at the Circle in the Square on Broadway. He most recently appeared as Neils Bohr in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen at the University of Oklahoma. He has written for and about the theater in essays, poetry, plays, and Spontaneous Behavior, a book on acting. One of his recent works, Dreaming Angel, was included in More Monologues for Men by Men and was also published in Newport Review. He was for many years the Artistic Director of The Image Theatre in New York, where he produced plays and taught acting. He was a tenured faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for twenty years. Mr. Austin is currently Artistic Director of The Liberty Free Theater in upstate New York. He and his wife, Oklahoma native and writer, Rilla Askew, divide their time between the Catskill mountains of New York and the Sans Bois.

Since he attended last year's Scissortail Festival, Alan Berecka has read at the DPF literary festival in Lithuania, had poems taken by journals such as The Concho River Review, Blue Rock Review and Ruminate; he was included in Travelin' Music: A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthire, and had his book Remembering the Body published by The Mongrel Empire Press. But perhaps his best moment came when he read the blurb which Ken Hada wrote for Remembering the Body: "You will laugh and cry as you read these poems, but most of all, you will think what a good and haunting thing it is to be human." Berecka is a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Timothy Bradford’s poetry has most recently appeared in No Tell Motel, Upstairs at Duroc, ecopoetics and Drunken Boat. His first book, Nomads with Samsonite, is forthcoming from BlazeVOX [books] in spring 2011. From 2007 to 2009, he was an associate foreign researcher with the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris while working on a novel. Currently, he is teaching English composition at the University of Central Oklahoma. He lives with his wife and two sons and an ever-changing menagerie just outside of Oklahoma City.

Joey Brown began as a fiction writer, and after a few short story publications, she completed a Master of Arts in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Oklahoma (1995). She remained at OU to complete a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies, with concentrations in Creative and Professional Writing, in 2000. She has published poems, short stories and essays in several national journals including Rhino, The Mid-America Poetry Review, The Dos Passos Review, The Chaffin Journal, Quiddity, Phantasmagoria, Westview, Argestes, Journal of the West, Front Range Review, storySouth and The Florida Review. Last year her poetry collection, Oklahomaography, was published by Mongrel Empire Press. Joey’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times.

Nathan Brown is a poet, musician and photographer from Norman, Oklahoma. He’s published five books of poetry, the most recent of which, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. Previous titles include: Not Exactly Job, Ashes Over the Southwest, Suffer the Little Voices and Hobson’s Choice. He is anthologized in Two Southwests and also recently released a new album, Gypsy Moon.

After receiving an MA in Literature from Wright State University in Dayton Ohio, James Brubaker moved to Oklahoma to begin work on a PhD in Creative Writing at OSU. His short stories are forthcoming or have appeared in Confrontation, Blue Mesa Review, Rabbit Catastrophe Review and The Cupboard. He is also a co-editor for the music section of the online arts journal, The Fiddleback.

J. Don Cook, whose hometown is Ada, is an artist, writer and photographer. As a photojournalist, he was nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize, one of them when he worked for the Ada Evening News in the seventies covering a double drowning when cousins fell through thin ice. The forthcoming essay and poem were written after Mr. Cook covered the famine in Ethiopia in the eighties. The University of Oklahoma Press just published a collection of his photographs and essays titled Shooting from the Hip.

Since earning an MFA from Wichita State University in 1996, Jeanne Dunbar-Green has taught as an adjunct at various colleges and universities, the last four years at East Central University and Murray State College. She is currently halfway through writing a new novel, tentatively entitled, Okieland, and about as far through a novel co-written with her husband Richard, tentatively titled, The Bee Tree. Her

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latest story was published in Sugar Mule as well as in Ain’t Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing.

Phil Estes is a first-year PhD student in Creative Writing an Oklahoma State University. Currently he is working on a poetry manuscript titled High Life. Poems from this manuscript have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Harpur Palate, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Greensboro Review and PANK.

Robert Ferrier received BA in Journalism and Master of Business Administration degrees from the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of four published novels at SynergEbooks.com. His poems have been published in ten literary journals. His collections, “Rhythms,” and “Ambient Light,” won Best Book of Poetry awards in 2004 and 2006 contests sponsored by the Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. He has begun a video chapbook series, “The Dante Dreams: Inferno,” on YouTube. Robert was a 2006 nominee for Poet Laureate of Oklahoma.

Steve Garrison’s novel Shoveling Smoke was published under the pseudonym “Austin Davis” by Chronicle Books in 2003. He is currently working on a novel set in a small Oklahoma town in the mid-1960s. A professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma, Garrison is married to Dr. Constance Squires, the director of the M.F.A. degree program in writing at UCO.

The work of Bayard Godsave has appeared in Cream City Review, Confrontation, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cimarron Review and the Evansville Review, among other places. He has completed two book-length manuscripts, and both are looking for publishers: The Torture Tree, a novel, and a collection of short stories called The Gas Mask (which includes "La Revolution du Ventose"). In 2001 Bayard received his MFA from Minnesota State University, Moorhead; in 2008 he received his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and currently he is an Assistant Professor of English at Cameron University.

An advocate for peace, freedom, and equality Shirley Hall challenges social, economical, religious, and political agendas through controversial poetry and essays. Her work is provocative, inspirational, and insightful. As a voice for the people behind the story, her poems minister to current affairs and emotions befitting the times. Shirley says, "My poetry is a teaching tool. It forces mankind to confront the consequences resulting from their decisions and face the snubbed realities of today’s “everyman”. Shirley has presented her poems in colleges and universities, and at social and professional venues. Her book One Day was selected among 10 others as required reading for a Humanities class at the University of Maryland. Her latest book is titled Listen.

Carol Hamilton has upcoming publications in South Carolina Review, Poet Lore, Art Times, Willard and Maple, Avocet, Quercus Review, Sunstone, Karamu, The Aurorean, Louisiana Literature, Abbey, Ibbetson Street, Southwestern American Literature, Poem, Listening Eye, California Quarterly and others. She has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize. Her latest works include Master of Theater: Peter the Great, released by Finishing Line Press, and a chapbook from Pudding House Press, Umberto Eco Lost His Gun, a book of peace poems.

Having finished her novel Cold Sunshine, and drafting a second titled Venus Flytrap, Tara Hembrough is looking for an agent. She graduated with her PhD in creative writing, fiction, and modernism, from Oklahoma State University in December. At OSU, she taught introductions to Creative Writing and Literature as well as reading for the Cimarron Review. She recently moved to Southern Illinois where she teaches English at John Logan College. A member of the Southern Illinois Writers' Guild, an excerpt of Cold Sunshine is published in the SIWG's anthology.

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Arn Henderson is an architect and Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma. He has authored two books of poetry, Document for an Anonymous Indian and The Surgeon General’s Collection. He also co-edited The Point Riders Great Plains Poetry Anthology and his work has appeared in several journals including World Literature Today, Nimrod, Interstate, Southwestern American Literature, Renegade 10, Broomweed Journal and Crosstimbers.

Jim Hunter was educated at Miami University and earned his Master's at Virginia Tech. He has been an actor, a writer, a cook, an accountant, a paramedic, and he currently teaches English at East Central University. His one published novel is called Drawing Constellations.

Jordan Jacobs teaches high school English in Lawton, Oklahoma. He has been writing poetry for approximately five years and has been published in both print and online journals, such as Borderline, Cooweescoowee, and The Whiskey Monologues. Jordan also performs at open mics and feature sets at various concerts around the state. In 2008, he self-released a chapbook of poetry entitled Sucking the Salt from God's Sweat.

Hardy Jones is the Direcor of Creative Writing at Cameron University. His writing has been awarded two grants and he has had over twenty-five pieces of fiction and nonfiction published in journals. His short story "Snow" appeared in the Dogzplot Flash Fiction Anthology 2009 and his novel Every Bitter Thing was published in 2010 by Black Lawrence Press.

Dr. Abigail Keegan is a Professor of English and Women's Literature at Oklahoma City University. In addition to essays on American and British writers and numerous poems, she has published two books of poetry, The Feast of the Assumptions and Oklahoma Journey and a critical book, Byron's Othered Self and Voice: Contextualizing the Homographic Signature. In 2007 she received a merit award from Byline Magazine's Silver Anniversary Poetry chapbook competition. Depending on the Weather, her latest book of poems, was published by Village Books Press, 2011.

Jennifer Kidney is a freelance scholar and published poet. She is the author of five books of poetry: Field Encounters, Endangered Species, Animal Magnetism, Women Who Sleep with the Dogs, and Life List. She has twice been nominated for Oklahoma Poet Laureate-by the Oklahoma Library Association in 2006 and by the Jim Lucas-Checotah Public Library in 2008, when she was one of three finalists for the distinction. She has a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and a M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English from Yale University and more than twenty years of university level teaching experience. She has also worked as a technical writer, poet-in-the-schools, and arts administrator. For twenty-two years, she oversaw the statewide reading and discussion program, “Let's Talk About It, Oklahoma,” and has made hundreds of “Let's Talk About It, Oklahoma,” scholar presentations on almost as many books. Kidney has won awards for her poetry, technical writing, and brownie baking. She lives in Norman with three cats and her dog Lizzie.

Chuck Ladd has successfully taught English in public schools in Southern Oklahoma and Northern Texas for over thirty years while also serving as adjunct professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University for fifteen years. He has also published a number of poetic works in a variety of journals and literary periodicals, but has dedicated himself to the advancement of Howard Starks’ poetry. Howard Starks was born in1929 in Shidler, Oklahoma. He served in the U.S. Army before earning a degree in English Education from East Central Oklahoma State University. He was all-but-dissertation Ph.D in English at the University of Oklahoma where he taught as a graduate assistant before teaching at the University of Nevada in Reno and the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1968 He became a professor of English and Humanities at Southeastern Oklahoma State University where he served until his retirement in 1995. In retirement Starks finally found time to collect and work on his poetry, mainly at the behest of fellow professors Elbert and Marion Hill and Dennis and Billie Letts. At Southeastern in Durant, Oklahoma, Tracy Letts , the son of Billie and Dennis began to view Howard as a mentor and would take the title of his Pulitzer Prize winning play "August: Osage County" directly from the title of one of Howard's poems. Starks only published book was Family Album (A Collection of Poetry) in 1996 and became a finalist in the 1997 Oklahoma Book Awards. A New York Times best-selling novelist, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, a number of prize-winning poets, a nationally acclaimed western artist, a number of actors from stage and screen, several other novelists all praise his work and consider him a friend and mentor. Howard Starks died in Durant, Oklahoma April 7th, 2003.

Billie Letts has received national and international recognition since starting her first novel at age 54. The award-winning author is a native of Tulsa. She retired as an English professor from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 1995. Letts is the author of four screenplays, including the filmed version of Veritas, Prince of Truth, and numerous short stories. Where The Heart Is was her first novel and it reached the coveted No. 1 slot on The New York Times’ paperback bestseller list. It was chosen as a read for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, has been published in 14 countries with more than three million copies sold and was made into a movie by 20th Century Fox in 2000. Her other novels are Honk And Holler Opening Soon, Shoot The Moon, and Made In The USA. Letts won the prestigious Walker Percy Literary Award at the 1994 New Orleans Writers Conference and the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction in 1996 and 1999. Honk and Holler Opening Soon was chosen as the “Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma” book in 2004.

George McCormick has published stories and poems most recently in Shenandoah, The Laurel Review, Concho River Review, and Acreage Journal. He splits time between Lawton, Oklahoma and Cook City, Montana. His story, "The Mexican", comes from a book collection entitled, The Salton Sea.

Ben Meyers’ first book of poems, Elegy for Trains, was recently published by Village Books Press. His poems have appeared in Ruminate, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Mobius, Byline, and other journals. Several of his poems are forthcoming online at poetrybay.com and as part of the Red Lion Square poetry podcast. His poem, "Tornado," is scheduled to be featured in the "Walt's Corner" column of the Long Islander newspaper, and his poem, "A Small Town Mourns its First Casualty," was included by Lee Bennett Hopkins in his book America at War (illustrated by Stephen Alcorn and published by McElderry Books, 2008). His essays on poetics have appeared in Studies in Philology, English Literary History, English Literary Renaissance, and other journals. Ben earned a Ph.D. from Washington University and currently is an associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Phillip Carol Morgan is the award-winning author of The Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store (Salt Publishing, 2006), co-author of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), author of Chickasaw Renaissance (Chickasaw Press, 2010) and Who Shall Gainsay Our Decision? Choctaw Literary Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chickasaw Press, forthcoming 2011). The father of three children, he collaborates professionally with Kate Morgan, his painter-sculptor wife of 30 years, and lives on his family’s original allotment farm in the northwestern region of the Chickasaw Nation. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets and holds a PhD in Native American literature form the University of Oklahoma.

Melissa Morphew, a native of Tennessee, is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University. Her work has appears in such journals as The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review and Parnassus: Poetry in Review. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission, winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, and winner of the W.B. Yeats Society Award in Poetry. She has been four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collections include Hunger and Heat: The Missionary Letters and The Garden Where All Loves End, and Fathom. Her two most recent collections are Weeding Borges’ Garden and Bluster.

John Graves Morris, Professor of English at Cameron University, is the author of Noise and Stories (Plain View Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in such journals as The Chariton Review, The Concho River Review, Jelly Bucket, Westview, Crosstimbers, Blood and Thunder, among others.

E. K. Mortenson works as an instructor in the Creative and Professional Writing MFA program at Western Connecticut State University. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, both in print and online. He is the author of Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010), What Wakes Us (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming), and was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.

Karen Neurohr has been researching Wilma McDaniel's life and writing since 2007 by conducting oral history interviews with twenty-eight of her family and friends for the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program of the Oklahoma State University Library. Along with other content, her interviews are being added to a library website about McDaniel and her legacy --http://digital.library.okstate.edu/mcdaniel. Karen is an Associate Professor and Assessment Librarian at Oklahoma State University where she is working on a doctoral degree in higher education. Sholds a Master's in Library Science from the University of North Texas and a Bachelor of Arts degree is in English Education from Northeastern State University. She co-chairs the Oklahoma Literary Landmarks Program for Friends of Libraries in Oklahoma (FOLIO) and serves as a Board Member for the Oklahoma Center for the Book of the Oklahoma Department of Libraries.

Susan Perabo is Writer in Residence and Associate Professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Glimmer Train, Story, TriQuarterly and The Missouri Review, and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. Her short story collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, was published in the summer of 1999 by Simon & Schuster, and named a "Book of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch. Her first novel, The Broken Places, was published in 2001. She is currently at work on a new collection of short stories. She holds an MFA from The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

Jason Poudrier is an Iraqi Freedom veteran who was awarded the Purple Heart. He was privileged to read from his manuscript of war poems titled "Baghdad International" at the 2008 and 2009 Scissortail Creative Writing Festivals and was the recipient of the John G. Morris Poetry Prize in 2008. His work has appeared in an anthology of Oklahoma Writers, the New Mexico Poetry Review, Connecticut Review, Sugar Mule, and Cameron University's Gold Mine.

Elizabeth Raby has a new manuscript titled This Dazzling Heartbreak. She has two previously published two poetry collections with Virtual Artists Collective: The Year the Pears Bloomed Twice (2009), and Ink on Snow (2010). She also has three previously published chapbooks. One of the poems from Ink on Snow, "Bride-to-Be," was selected as the winning poem for Angelo State University's 2010 Kelton Poetry Contest. Elizabeth was a poet-in-the-schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She recently read and conducted a workshop at the New Mexico Women Author's Book Festival. She has lived with her husband Jim in Santa Fe since 2001.

Dean Rader’s first book of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize.

Poems in the book also garnered the 2008 Crab Creek Review Prize and the 2009 Sow's Ear Poetry Prize. Other poems have been published in Colorado Review, POOL, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, Quarterly West, and others. Dean also reviews poetry regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle and The Rumpus, and he blogs about the intersection of arts/media/politics/culture at The Weekly Rader. Dean is also widely published in the field of American Indian Studies. His book Speak To Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (edited with Janice Gould) was published in 2003 and earlier this year, he curated a special issue of Sentence devoted to contemporary American Indian prose poetry. His book, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film, is forthcoming in April of 2011 from the University of Texas Press. Dean lived in Oklahoma for the first 18 years of his life and still consider it home. Presently, he is a professor at the University of San Francisco, and lives in San Francisco with his wife, Jill, and son, Gavin.

The poems and essays of Carol Coffee Reposa have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Coal City Review, The Formalist, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Valparaiso Review, The Texas

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Observer, and other journals and anthologies. She has three collections of poetry: At the Border: Winter Lights, The Green Room, and Facts of Life. Nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, she also has received three Fulbright-Hays Fellowships, the first for study in Russia (1995), a second for research in Peru and Ecuador (1999), and a third for work in Mexico (2005). A professor emeritus of English at San Antonio College, she still serves as nonfiction editor for Concho River Review.

Jason Roberts is pursuing a doctorate in English with a Creative Writing emphasis at Oklahoma State University. He is in his sixth year, and says with luck, he will graduate this summer. (though given our economy, he says he is not sure he wants such luck!). This is Jason’s second appearance at Scissortail Festival.

John G. Rodwan, Jr., is the author of Fighters & Writers (Mongrel Empire Press, 2010), a collection of essays on boxing and literature that combine literary criticism, journalism and memoir. One of the selections in Fighters & Writers was named a Notable Essay of 2009 by The Best American Essays and another was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His writing has been published by The American Interest, The Mailer Review, Blood and Thunder, Spot Literary Magazine, The Nevada Review, The Oregonian, Palimpsest, Fight News, Free Inquiry, The Humanist and The Brooklyn Rail, among other journals, magazines and newspapers. He wrote and co-produced the independent documentary No Neutral Corner, which was an official selection of the 2010 All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival and winner of the Las Vegas Film Festival’s Silver Ace Award. A former editor with the International Labor Office, he contributed to the organization’s Encylopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety. He was a Thomas C. Rumble Fellow at Wayne State University . Raised in Detroit , Michigan , he has also lived in Geneva , Switzerland , and Brooklyn , New York . He currently resides in Portland , Oregon .

Steven Schroeder grew up in the Texas Panhandle, where he first learned to take nothing seriously, and his poetry continues to be rooted in the experience of the Plains. He teaches at the University of Chicago in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults and at Shenzhen University (China). In addition to numerous poetry and philosophy publications in regional, national and international journals, Schroeder’s poetry book titles include: A Dim Sum of the Day Before (Ink Brush Press, 2010), a guest giving way like ice melting: thirteen ways of looking at laozi (Ink Brush Press, 2010), Six Stops South (Cherry Grove, 2009), The Imperfection of the Eye (Virtual Artists Collective, 2007), Fallen Prose (Virtual Artists Collective, 2006), Theory of Cats (Pudding House Publications, 2003). He has also edited or contributed to several anthologies such as on the no road way to tomorrow (Virtual Artists Collective, 2009), and Two Southwests (Virtual Artists Collective, 2008).

Carl Sennhenn is a retired English professor, Poet Laureate of Oklahoma 2001 - 2003 and winner of the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award in poetry for his book Travels Through Enchanted Woods. Currently Carl teaches one literature class a semester at Rose State and a creative writing class for senior adults in Continuing Education at Rose. Poems in “An Irish Idyll” will appear in a forthcoming book of poetry.

Karen Eileen Sisk received her M.A. in Literature and Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio in 2008. Since then, she has been working on a doctorate in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared or is forth coming in Nexus and Permafrost. Her current working poetry collection is titled Ruins.

Sandra Soli's career includes radio broadcasting, regional theater in the U.S. and Europe, and special projects such as taping Tokyo Rose segments for military training. She has published articles, short

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fiction for adults and children, photography, and poetry. A past author of the month for Highlights Magazine, she received the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award in poetry, LSU's Eyster Poetry Prize, and two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Active with arts organizations and known for mentoring writers around the state, she serves on the board of the Oklahoma Center for the Book, teaches by E-mail and by

invitation, and enjoys collaborative projects with artists in other disciplines; she has worked with dancers, artists, musicians, actors, and clergy to develop new works. Sandra holds an honors M.A. from UCO. Annually, she coordinates a special project for National Poetry Month and also volunteers many hours each year at the Civic Center in downtown Oklahoma City.

Retired insurance adjuster Jim Spurr graduated high school in Shawnee, Oklahoma and completed a degree from Oklahoma Baptist University. Born in Crystal City, Texas, he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army having served in the 82nd Airborne. Some of his poems have been published nationally, fifteen magazines and ten states. His book , Open Mike/Thursday Night, was a finalist for the 2008 Oklahoma Book Award, and his book It's Cool at 2AM won second place 2009 at Palettes and Quills, Ithaca, N.Y. Another collection is forthcoming in 2011. He and his wife live in Shawnee where he has been co-host of the highly popular Shawnee reading since 1993.

Constance Squires has a novel, Along The Watchtower, forthcoming from Riverhead/Penguin and is at work on a new novel. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of places, including The Atlantic Monthly, Identity Theory, Eclectica, The Dublin Quarterly, The New Delta Review, The Gingko Tree Review, Bayou, and The Briar Cliff Review. She is the winner of the Bob Schacochis Short Story Award, the Matt Clark Fiction Prize, the Briar Cliff Review Short Fiction Award, and has received numerous nominations for Best New American Voices, the Pushcart Prize, the Million Writers Award, and the O.Henry Prize. She lives with her husband and daughter in Edmond, Oklahoma where she directs the M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Jane Vincent Taylor’s first book of poems was a joint collection with Judith Tate O'Brien entitled By the Grace of Ghosts. It was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in 2005. In 2007, Jane collaborated with Anita Skeen in a collection of poems, When We Say Shelter. In 2008 Jane and Anita co-edited a collection of essays, poems and stories by Ghost Ranch writers entitled Once Upon a Place: Writing from Ghost Ranch. Jane wrote her latest book, What Can Be Saved, (Finishing Line Press) on her own – if you don't count the duet of voices from her childhood that make up the collection. Jane has a Master's in Creative Writing from University of Central Oklahoma, a Master of Library Science and a BA in Women's Studies from the University of Oklahoma. She is a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow. Journal publications include Red Cedar Review, Whetstone, Enigmatist, Red Plains Review, Calyx, Flyway, Third Wednesday, Rhino, among others. Recent activities are posted at janevincenttaylor.blogspot.com.

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Andrew Terhune is originally from Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of the chapbooks Helen Mirren Picks Out My Clothes (The Greying Ghost Press, 2009) and Handle This Bludgeon and Run Me Through (Tilt Press, 2008). He currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma with his wife and two daughters, where he is pursuing a PhD in English/Poetry at Oklahoma State University.

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Larry D. Thomas was the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Born and reared in West Texas, Thomas has lived in Houston since 1967. He graduated from the University of Houston with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He started writing poetry seriously in the early 1970s during his four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy. After his discharge, he was hired by the Harris County Adult Probation Department where he rose from the rank of probation officer to unit supervisor and ultimately to branch director, the position he held until his retirement in 1998. Thomas has published widely in regional and national journals. His first book collection, The Lighthouse Keeper, was published by Timberline Press in late 2000 and was selected by the Small Press Review as a “pick-of-the-issue” (May/June 2001). He has since then published fifteen additional collections of poems which have received several prestigious prizes and awards including a Western Heritage Award, two Texas Review Poetry Prizes, three pushcart nominations and five Spur Award finalist citations from the Western Writers of America. Recent notable titles include the recently released A Murder of Crows (Virtual Artists Collective), The Skin of Light, New and Selected Poems, The Fraternity of Oblivion, Where Skulls Speak Wind, Stark Beauty and Amazing Grace.

Hugh Tribbey's poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Sugar Mule, Otoliths, Experiential-Experimental Literature, and Moria. He is the author of five collections of poetry: Finish Your Sentence, Juvjula Detours, Asteroid, Waitinale Glasses, and Mime Box. Hugh holds a Ph.D. in Practical Poetics and Contemporary Literature from Oklahoma State University and teaches literature and creative writing at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma.

Alvin Turner is Dean Emeritus of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of History at East Central University. He remains active in research, writing history and poetry and pastoring a small Presbyterian church. His recent books include a poetic history Hanging Men and a biography of progressive preacher L.W. Marks (Mongrel Empire Press, 2009).

Ron Wallace has four volumes of poetry, all published by TJMF Publishing of Clarksville, Indiana: Native Son (American Poems from the Heart of Oklahoma), a finalist in the 2007 Oklahoma Book Awards, Smoke and Stone (The Voices of Gettysburg) and I Come from Cowboys… and Indians, the winner of the 2009 Oklahoma Writer's Federation Best Book of Poetry Award. His latest book is Oklahoma Cantos. Ron is a native Oklahoman whose Scots/Irish roots are woven securely into his Choctaw, Cherokee, Osage lineage. He is currently an adjunct faculty member of Southeastern Oklahoma State University. His work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies such as: Sugar Mule, Crosstimbers, Encore, NFSPS Prize Poems, Grandmother Earth XIV, di-verse-city 2010, Walt's Corner in The Long Islander, The Enigmatist and Travelin' Music (A Poetic Tribute to Woody Guthrie).

Mark Walling is a professor in English at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. He has fiction and poetry in issues of New Plains Review, Louisiana Literature, South Dakota Review, Chariton Review, Sugar Mule, among others, and in the recent anthology Aint Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing.

Sarah Webb is a retired English professor from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. She serves as poetry editor for Crosstimbers and is co-editor for Just This, a zen arts magazine from the Austin Zen Center. Sarah performs poetry chorally in Quartet, a poetry performance troupe (with Carol Hamilton, Carl Sennhenn, and Dena Madole). Her essays and poetry have been published in Zen Bow, Zen Gong, Just This; The Oklahoma English Journal, Sugar Creek, Westview, Passager, The Enigmatist, and The Appalachee Quarterly, among others.

Dan Wilcox is the host of the Third Thursday Poetry Night at the Social Justice Center in Albany, N.Y. and is a member of the poetry performance group "3 Guys from Albany" (who travel the country reading and writing poetry in every city named “Albany” in the country, including Albany, Oklahoma). As a photographer, he claims to have the world's largest collection of photos of unknown poets. His chapbook boundless abodes of Albany is available from Benevolent Bird Press of Delmar, NY. You can read his Blog about the Albany poetry scene at dwlcx.blogspot.com.

Jim Wilson's MFA in creative nonfiction (2007) is from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is a professor of English at Seminole State College in Seminole, Oklahoma, and resides in West Ada, Oklahoma. His memoir-in-progress is The Journeyman, which is about becoming an archaeologist in 1980s, civil war Lebanon. Since 2007, Jim has taught creative writing in Ada for the Chickasaw Nation's Summer Arts Academy. In 2009 he initiated Going Forward/Looking Back, a community archaeology and creative writing project at the Daggs' Prairie site in West Ada.

The After-Wrap: Vagrant Plays Vintage 22

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Where The Heart Is author Billie Letts to be featured at 6th annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival

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(Updated March 11, 2011): The annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is back for its sixth year and bigger than ever with four featured authors, including Where The Heart Is author Billie Letts. In addition, more than 50 regional, published and emerging authors will make presentations during the three-day festival, March 31 – April 2, on the campus of East Central University in Ada, Okla. All sessions are free and open to the public.

Billie Letts

Billie Letts is scheduled to speak at 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 2, in the Estep Multimedia Center. She has received national and international recognition since starting her first novel at age 54. The award-winning author is a native of Tulsa. She retired as an English professor from Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 1995.

Letts is the author of four screenplays, including the filmed version of Veritas, Prince of Truth, and numerous short stories. Where The Heart Is was her first novel and it reached the coveted No. 1 slot on The New York Times’ paperback bestseller list. It was chosen as a read for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, has been published in 14 countries with more than three million copies sold and was made into a movie by 20th Century Fox in 2000.

Her other novels are Honk And Holler Opening Soon, Shoot The Moon and Made In The USA.

Letts won the prestigious Walker Percy Literary Award at the 1994 New Orleans Writers Conference and the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction in 1996 and 1999. Honk and Holler Opening Soon was chosen as the “Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma” book in 2004.

The other three featured authors for the writing festival are Larry D. Thomas, Jonis Agee and Susan Perabo.

Larry D. Thomas

Larry D. Thomas was the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. Born and reared in West Texas, Thomas has lived in Houston since 1967. He graduated from the University of Houston with a bachelor’s degree in English literature.

He started writing poetry seriously in the early 1970s during his four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy. Immediately after his discharge, he was hired by the Harris County Adult Probation Department where he rose from the rank of probation officer to unit supervisor and ultimately to branch director, the position he held until his retirement in 1998.

Thomas wrote consistently on weekends during his 31-year career in social service and adult criminal justice and was quite successful during that time in placing his poems in numerous respected national literary journals. His first collection of poetry, The Lighthouse Keeper, was published by Timberline Press in late 2000 and was selected by the Small Press Review as a “pick-of-the-issue” (May/June 2001). He has since then published 15 additional collections of poems which have received several prestigious prizes and awards.

Jonis Agee was born in Omaha, Neb. and grew up in Nebraska and Missouri, places where many of her stories and novels are set. She is the author of 13 books, including five novels, five collections of short fiction and two books of poetry.

In her newest novel, The River Wife, five generations of women experience love and heartbreak, passion and deceit against the backdrop of the 19th century south. The book has been selected by the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and the Quality Paperback Book Club.

Agee earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and her master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln where she teaches creative writing and 20th century fiction.

Susan Perabo is a writer in residence and associate professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Glimmer Train, Story, Tri-Quarterly and The Missouri Review and in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. Perabo’s short story collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, was published in 1999, and named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and The Miami Herald. Her first novel, The Broken Places, was published in 2001. A new collection of short stories is forthcoming. Perabo holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas.

The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival runs from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday. Each day is broken into several sessions. For a complete schedule of readers, visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.

The Darryl Fisher High School Creative Writing Contest winners will also be awarded during the festival. The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is sponsored in part by the Oklahoma Arts Council. For more information, contact Dr. Ken Hada at 580-559-5557 or visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.

Scissortail 2011: The Poster

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Revised poster posted March 11, 2011 at 3 p.m.; Originally posted November 2, 2010 at 2:07 p.m.

Scissortail 2011: Call for submissions

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* The Scissortail Festival celebrates published, established and emerging authors reading from their creative works of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. (No workshops, how-to, propaganda or pre-arranged panels are acceptable). Reading sessions will be mixed-genre and styles and will consist of 3 – 4 readers per session.

* Authors should plan for 15 - 20 minutes (maximum) reading time (including fiction!)

* Email submissions encouraged. Submit a brief cover letter with complete contact information and a brief biographical narrative along with title of your program and sample/s of work to be considered.

* Deadline for submission: January 4, 2011 (early submissions and confirmations strongly encouraged – space is limited). Reading schedule will be set by February 1).

* Send email submissions to: khada@ecok.edu. Identify “Scissortail Submission” in the

subject line. You may also mail submissions to: Dr. Hada, Department of English &

Languages, East Central University, 1100 E. 14th St. Ada, OK 74820.

* Participants are not charged registration fees. Please check your calendar before submitting. See http://www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com for information and updates.

* Special thanks to primary supporters: Dr. Darryl Fisher, ECU Cultural Activities and The Oklahoma Arts Council.

Letter to 2010 Festival Authors

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Dear Festival Authors,

It is my pleasure to welcome you to East Central University and to the 5th annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. It is my distinct honor to be involved with this festival, and so I want to take this moment to tell each of you in writing (and hopefully, later, in person) how much each of you mean to the festival. You enrich our campus, our state, and my life personally by your positive involvement with this festival.

In the past few weeks I have overheard folks using the terms: democratic, friendly, inspiring, and similar phrases to describe Scissortail. I appreciate these comments because I know that you understand the heart of what we are doing here. You realize that some of you are highly published and internationally recognized, and that others are promising, but are still working on developing your publishing career. At Scissortail, we intentionally mix you all together, regardless of achievement or acclaim, personality or style, because, above all, we are celebrating creativity, even as we inspire one another and our audiences. Some phrase from my athletic past sounds in my ears: No one is special; everyone is important – and that includes you. If such common sense can come from an athletic arena, just imagine what gifted literary people can do with a similar mantra.

I appreciate your embracing of this festival “philosophy” and I hope you have a great time listening, reading, supporting and building friendships. So put your ego in your pocket, take your turn at the podium and Let Er Rip! Who knows when a world may be listening?

Peace,

Ken Hada
April 2010

That's a Wrap!

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Scissortail 2010 is in the bag. Congratulations to all who read. We look forward to seeing you next year: March 31-April 2, 2011!

Readers pictured here : John Yozzo (at left), and then, clockwise: Jane Taylor, Ron Wallace (in the straw hat), Hardy Jones (in the snap brim), and Dorothy Alexander (in the red hat).

It's On!

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As of 9:30 this morning, April first, 2010, the Fifth Annual the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is under way! If you are attending the Festival and have heard you something you like, please leave a comment here so that the authors and everyone else can know what you think. Just click on the comment button below to leave a comment and read the comments left by others.

Scissortail 2010!

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Mark your calendar! ECU once again hosts the largest (and many say the best) writing festival in the state and region. (Click here to see the schedule.) This year we have at least 7 poets laureate, past and present, from various states. We have at least 10 state and national book award winners. You’ve read their works (or heard of them) : Joy Harjo, Jim Barnes, Larry Thomas, James Hoggard, LeAnne Howe, Tim Tingle et al!!! Any one of a possible 25 of these authors would be a fine show for us, but all these highly acclaimed authors are just part of the ECU festival! We have 57 authors (click here to read their biographies) slated to read. You won’t want to miss this bonanza of creative energy! Plan to attend various sessions, your attendance is so helpful for ECU as well as appreciated by the authors. Please spread the word via your contacts and media outlets. Thank you!

Also, there will be a special gathering after the Friday evening session especially for you and students (and authors) from other universities – more about this later (under the direction of Drs. Walling, Benton and Grasso).

These authors and I look forward to sharing a great weekend with you!

Ken Hada (that's me at right)

Scissortail TV

2010-03-25T09:32:00.000-05:00

This Saturday, March 27, at 5:30 p.m., a 10-minute interview primarily about the soon-to-be-here Scissortail Festival, featuring its director, our very own Ken Hada, will be broadcast by OETA on OKC Metro.

Or click here to get a sneak preview. Featured Scissortail speaker, poet laureate Jim Barnes, is interviewed at the start of the program. Dr. Hada and Scissortail reader Jeanetta Calhoun Mish come in at the 13:51 mark.

Winners of the 6th Annual R. Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest

2010-03-09T16:45:00.000-06:00

Prizes for Oklahoma’s most prestigious high school writing competition will be awarded at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, April 1-3, 2010. (Winners are strongly encouraged to attend the awards ceremony at East Central University.) Congratulations!

Click on the links to read the works.
Fiction
First Place (prize $250)
Nicki Peterson, Norman North, "Forsaken"
Second Place ($150):
Liana Willis, Norman North, "The Congregation"
Third Place ($100):
Lydia Hall, Norman North, "Out"
Honorable Mentions ($25 each):
Teddie Gwinn, Altus, "Because His Eyes"
Joceyln Roberts, Norman North, "Letting Go"
Keaira Woolfolk, Star Spencer, "My Story"
Paige Warren, Norman North, "Fire Inside"
Erin Fuller, Verdigris, "Job Anxiety"
Abbie Vestal,Broken Bow, "Beautiful Destruction on Glory Road"

Poetry
First Place ($250):
Katlynn Fife, Lawton High School, "Windmill or Wyvern?"
Second Place ($150):
Kayla Crego, Norman North High School, "They"
Third Place ($100):
Meghen Mann, Ada High School, "My Play On Words" & "Human Fire"
Honorable Mentions ($25 each):
Anna Halverson, Lawton High School, "Drowned Out Flames"
Angela Shen, Norman North High School, "What goes on behind closed doors" & "Shanghai"
KayLeigh Thomason, Pittsburg High School, "I know, I hear"
Gage Few, Ada High School, "Dancing Sheet Music"
Jamie Little, Durant High School, "Last Loves"
Arthur Dixon, Ardmore High School, "Namesake" & "Sonnet for Amy"

We congratulate all the winners and invite you to send us a digital copy of all or part of your winning works if you would like to see them posted on the ecuenglishtalk website where other authors, teachers and the general public may enjoy it. This is not a requirement--just an invitation. If you are interested, send an e-mail to sbenton@ecok.edu and stipulate whether you want us to post all or part of your work (a teaser). If you want only part of it posted, you may also choose to send us an e-mail address we can use to contact you if interested readers write in to say that they would like to read the “rest of the story.” (We will not publish your e-mail address online.)

Thank you!

Contest Guidelines:
* All Oklahoma high school students (9th - 12th grade) are eligible.
* Poetry (up to 100 lines) or Short Fiction (up to 5,000 words) is acceptable.
* Limit 5 poems and 1 short fiction piece per student.
* All entries must be the original work of the student.
* All entries must be neatly typed; please double-space fiction entries.
* Entries will not be returned, so keep your originals.
* No identifying marks should be on the manuscript itself, except for the title.
* Provide cover page with contact information: 1) Student’s name; 2) Teacher’s name 3) School 4) Classification 5) Phone number, Email and mailing address.
* Work may be submitted through conventional mail or email.
Contest Information: Dr. Joshua Grasso (580-559-5430); Dr. Mark Walling (580-559-5440). Scissortail Creative Writing Festival Information: Dr. Ken Hada (580-559-5557)

2010 Scissortail: Schedule of Readings

2010-02-19T16:26:00.000-06:00

Thursday April 1

I. 9:30 - 10:45 Estep Auditorium
Phil Morgan, Blanchard, Oklahoma
The Island Poems
Jeanetta Mish, Norman, Oklahoma
The Angle of History & other poems
Patricia Goodrich, Quakertown, Pennsylvania
Red Mud & other poems

II. 11:00 - 12:15 Estep Auditorium
James Hoggard (see image at right), Midwestern State University
Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems
Marcia Preston, Edmond, Oklahoma
The Wind Comes Sweeping
Nathan Brown, University of Oklahoma
My Sideways Heart

*** Lunch ***

III. 2:00 - 3:15 North Lounge
Johnnie Catfish, Edmond, Oklahoma
Conversing Art and Love
George McCormick, Cameron University
The Empire Builder
Jane Taylor, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
The Plain Spoke Poems

IV. 2:00 - 3:15 Estep Auditorium
Sarah Webb, Burnet, Texas
Black & other poems
Jim Wilson, University of Illinois
The Journeyman
Gordon Greene, Midwest City, Oklahoma
Traveling Companions & other poems

V. 3:30 - 4:45 North Lounge
Dorothy Alexander, Cheyenne, Oklahoma
Lessons from an Oklahoma Girlhood
Hardy Jones, Cameron University
Beatrice’s Thanksgiving
Ron Wallace, Durant, Oklahoma
Oklahoma Cantos

VI. 3:30 -4:45 Estep Auditorium
Jennifer Kidney, Norman Oklahoma
Before the Fall & other poems
Marcella Remund, University of South Dakota
Tarnished Saints and Desperate Prayer
Hugh Tribbey, East Central University
Googlism for “Through” & other poems

*** Dinner ***

VII. 6:30 pm. Ataloa Theater
Hallie Brown Ford Fine Arts Center

Fisher High School Contest Winners
Featuring Joy Harjo (see image at right)

Friday April 2

VIII. 9:00 - 10:15 Estep Auditorium
Melissa Morphew, Sam Houston State University
Fathom & other poems
Al Turner
Hanging Men & other poems
Elizabeth Raby, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Ink on Snow

IX. 9:00 - 10:15 North Lounge
Maria Hooley, Lawton, Oklahoma
Hidden Realms
Jerry Brigham, East Central University
Tales of the Tundra
Bayard Godsave, Cameron University
Sudden Fiction

X. 10:30 - 11:45 North Lounge
Carol Hamilton, Midwest City, Oklahoma
Contrapuntal & other poems
J. Don Cook, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
The Year My Mother was an Accessory
John Morris, Cameron University
Revisiting the Grounds & other poems

XI. 10:30 - 11:45 Estep Auditorium
Steven Schroeder, Chicago & Shenzhen Universities
A Dim Sum of the Day Before
Abigail Keegan, Oklahoma City University
Depending on the Weather & other poems
Steve Garrison, University of Central Oklahoma
from a novel in progress

XII. 1:15 – 2:45 North Lounge
Carl Sennhenn, Norman, Oklahoma
Travels through Enchanted Woods & other poems
Leah Kayajanian, University of Oklahoma
The Day They Wouldn’t Rape Me
Jim Spurr, Shawnee, Oklahoma
Open Mike Thursday Night & other poems
Tracy Haught, Lawton, Oklahoma
Beyond Bonnie’s House

XIII. 1:15 - 2:45 Estep Auditorium
Sandra Soli, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Necessary Angel & other poems
Connie Squires, University of Central Oklahoma
Along the Watchtower
Robert Ferrier, Norman, Oklahoma
Red Clay Rhythms: Oklahoma Poems
Mark Walling, East Central University
The Drop-off

XIV. 3:00 - 4:30 Estep Auditorium
Bryan Mitschell, University of Central Oklahoma
Status & other poems
Alan Berecka, Del Mar College
The Comic Flaw & other poems
Larry Thomas (see image above at right), Houston, Texas
The Skin of Light
Tim Tingle (see image at right), Canyon Lake, Texas
short fiction

*** Dinner ***

XV. 6:30 pm. Estep Auditorium

Featuring Jim Barnes (see image at left)

Saturday, April 3

XVI. 9:00 - 10:30 North Lounge

Steve Benton, East Central University
Losing My Religion on a Post-Soviet Train
Tara Hembrough, Oklahoma State University
The Marriage in the Graveyard
LeAnne Howe (see image at right), University of Illinois
Ibn Hen
Jillian Logan, University of South Dakota
Flocked

XVII 9:00 - 10:30 Estep Auditorium
Chris Clark, East Central University
A Page has Turned & other poems
Philip Mackenzie, Cameron University
Solid Avoirdupois
Josh Gaines, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Poems Hiding in the Notes
Arn Henderson, University of Oklahoma
The Lost Journal of the Second Trip to Purgatorie

XVIII. 10:45 - 12:00 North Lounge
Jenny Yang Cropp, University of South Dakota
Penance & other poems
Molly Lemmons, Mustang, Oklahoma
Kind of Heart
Greg Rodgers, Warr Acres, Oklahoma
The Ghost of Mingo Creek

XIX. 10:45 - 12:00 Estep Auditorium
John Yozzo, East Central University
Mathematics of Girl & other poems
Shirley Hall, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
Listen & other poems
Don Stinson, Northern Oklahoma College
Sparkling All the Way Down

It's a Wrap!

2010-02-19T16:15:00.000-06:00

You are invited:

· to join friends of the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival and English students of East Central University at the Scissortail Wrap Party at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center (see image at right) at 400 S. Rennie in Ada, Oklahoma on Friday, April 1st, from 7:45-ish to 9:30-ish (food and drinks will be served—free!—to the first fifty or so to make it through the door);

· to enjoy the Page One Literary Art Gallery which will be on display there for one night and one night only;

· to contribute an original work to the Page One Literary Art Gallery (click here to see submission guidelines);

·
to enjoy an after-wrap wrap at Papa Gjorgjo’s North Lounge at 1600 N. Mississippi in Ada (once the Literary Art Gallery awards have been announced, folks 21-and-over who are in attendance at the Wrap Party can pick up free beer tickets redeemable at Papa Gjorgjo);

· to make a day of it by attending afternoon and evening sessions of the 6th Annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in the ESTEP Center at East Central University. At 6:30 featured author Larry Thomas takes the main stage;

· to make a long weekend of it. This year’s Scissortail Creative Writing Festival--the largest (and many say the best) writing festival in the state and the region-- kicks off on Thursday, March 1st at 9:30, and runs through three p.m. on Saturday, April 2nd ). Click here to get the $85 Scissortail Festival Hotel rate at the Holiday Inn Express here in Ada.

· to reserve a place for the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival--held each year on the first weekend of April— in your calendar for years to come. For more information on the festival, click here.

Budget Details:

· Price to attend the Wrap: $0.00

· Price to enter a submission in the Page One Literary Art Gallery: $0.00

This event enjoys the sponsorship and support of Literati (ECU’s English Student Club), Originals (ECU’s student-run creative writing journal), ECU’s Sigma Tau Delta chapter(International English Honor Society), and Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Answers to Your Questions about the Page One Literary Art Gallery

2010-02-19T16:05:00.001-06:00

Q: In general, I'm not quite sure I understand what exactly the Page One Literary Art Gallery is. What's the history here?

A: To my knowledge, the Page One Literary Art Gallery is the only gallery of its kind. We came up with the concept in 2009. The 2012 edition will be our third gallery.

Q: What exactly is displayed/showcased in this exhibit and in what way?

A: A single page of original creative writing in any genre, not previously published. May be a single poem. May be the first page of a short story with a note that reads: "to read the rest of this story go to www.ecuenglishtalk.blogspot.com" or some other link (Or it might not have such a note if there's nothing else besides the first page.) Everything that goes on the page and how it gets there (font, design, etc.) is up to the author. That single piece of paper will be centered on a large black foam core backing that will serve as its frame. The frames will be displayed around the Ada Arts and Heritage Center in the way that paintings might be displayed around an art gallery.

Q: What happens with the submissions?

A: When we get the submissions, we mount them and display them at the Ada Arts and Heritage Gallery, where they may be seen on the night of the Scissortail Wrap Party. Once all the submissions are in, our judges determine which ones are "outstanding." Awards will come in the form of book-buying gift certificates at the Scissortail book table.

Q: I see that readers of the Scissortail Writing Fest are not eligible for the prizes or awards, but are we welcome/encouraged to submit material for this event anyway? Or is it meant to showcase a more specific target talent?

A: The gift certificates are for authors who are not a part of the scheduled program, but everyone--including authors in the scheduled program--is very much welcome to submit something.