Professional Writer's Series: Kim Stafford, “Making Memories Matter”

WSU Vancouver Professional Writer's Series

February — April 2013

Washington State University Vancouver’s Professional Writers Symposium introduces students and guests to award-winning writers from a variety of literary genres. On Thursday evenings from February through April, six Northwest writers will speak about the trajectory of their careers including their achievements and setbacks. Gain insight into the writing process and the ways these artists intersect with their creative communities. You may even find new ways to navigate your own literary career path.

Kim Stafford

Making Memories Matter

Poet, essayist and memoirist Kim Stafford moves across writing genres to find the core of human experience in the imagined and the real. His latest book, “100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared,” confronts the death of his brother. 

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye calls “100 Tricks,” “a stunning book of exquisite consolation and understanding, not so much about loss as discovery.”

Stafford is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Western States Book Award. Founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, his books include “Having Everything Right: Essays of Place,” “The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft,” “A Thousand Friends of Rain: New & Selected Poems” and “Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford.”