Windfall Reading Series

On Tuesday, May 20, Nance Van Winckel and Lisa Rosen will share their work. Both writers are gifted at finding unexpected beauty in the objects and actions of ordinary life.

The free reading starts at 7 pm in the Bascom-Tykeson Room of the downtown library. Refreshments will be served, and books will be available for purchase and signing. Windfall readings are co-sponsored by EPL, Lane Literary Guild, and the Cultural Services Division of Lane Arts Council. This is the last reading until September, so don’t miss this event.

Nance Van Winckel’s fifth collection of poems, No Starling, was recently released by the University of Washington Press. In this book, Van Winckel continues her work of mining both familiar and unfamiliar territory, unearthing sparkling insights that are often told with a twist. Even a brief perusal of the poem titles in No Starling gives the reader a sense of the poet’s innate curiosity and wisdom, her edgy humor and her humility: “We Called Goodbye, But She Was Already Gone,” “The Rattled Hymn of the Republic,” “I Talk to the Bread, I Chat with the Dough,” “I Am My Own Assistant.”

The opening poem “Slate,” places us in one of Van Winckel’s typically provocative situations: the speaker is carting off a corpse named “Nance,” heading toward a nearby quarry to dump it off. The wry and energetic recounting of details and events gives us Van Winckel at her dazzling, energetic best.

Van Winckel is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. New poems appear in The Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. She is also the author of three collections of short fiction (Limited Lifetime Warranty, Quake and Curtain Creek Farm) and has received the 2005 Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship and the Patterson Fiction Award.

Van Winckel teaches in the MFA Programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College. In spring 2009 she will be the Stadler Poet in Residence at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. She lives in Spokane with her husband, visual artist Rik Nelson.

Lisa Rosen was born in Baltimore, Maryland and as a teenager moved with her family to Tucson, Arizona. Rosen earned an MA in English from Colorado State University. She has taught in the Academic Leaning Skills and English as a Second Language departments at Lane Community College. Her chapbook, Bright Omens, was published in February, 2008 by Traprock Books. The poems in Bright Omens focus on family and loss and on the hope—the “bright omens”—that arise out of darkness. Through the process of writing Rosen finds a way out of this darkness, discovering everywhere and in everything possibilities of transformation. With stunning clarity and poignancy, Rosen writes about the illness and death of two sisters, about her own illness, about love and pain, struggle and hope, and the sense of mystery that pervades the human condition.

Rosen sees signs everywhere, most often in the world of nature. Her language is rich in imagery that weaves thematically through the poems: spiders spreading “their white webs like quilted air,” birds sending up a sound “like dozens of scissors opening and closing,” flowers floating “like pale stars in the grass.” With courage and faith the poet explores “the dark material of stones / and whatever it is we’ll follow / when we float / bodiless from this place.”

Lisa Rosen’s poems have appeared in Poetry East, Kaleidoscope, Gertrude, and Hubbub, among others. Several of her poems were recently anthologized in the Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. She also won the 2007 Jane’s Stories Press Poetry Prize.

She lives in Eugene with her husband, Don, and their beloved dog, the senior member of the household.