Local judge and storyteller Ed Putka will kick off WordFest’s fall season next Tuesday, September 12, 6:00 pm, at the Cassava Coffeehouse.

A WordFest favorite, Ed has been compared to Garrison Keillor for his popular Cleveland stories, set in the Polish neighborhood of his youth. Once again combining memory and humor, Ed will share another tale of how the old gang helped the new kid with the all-time worst name get through school.

Steve Anderson will read excerpts from the third in his Book of Hours trilogy. The resplendent fifteenth century Book of Hours has been restored and presented to Pope Gregory XVII, but what will happen to the ancient shreds of parchment that Brother Alphaios and archivist Inaki Arriagi found within its covers?

The parchment holds a deep secret that undercuts one of the very pillars of Catholicism. Will Alphaios be able to continue a monastic life or be driven from it for his disobedience?

Steve lives and writes in Longview.

Alan Rose will read from his recently completed novel, As If Death Summoned, about the AIDS epidemic. Alan was involved in the epidemic, first in Australia in the 1980s, and then working at Cascade AIDS Project in Portland through the 1990s.

Alan has written two earlier novels, The Legacy of Emily Hargraves, a paranormal mystery, and Tales of Tokyo, a quest novel set in modern day Japan, as well as a novella, The Unforgiven, a psychological mystery published by Bold Strokes Books in 2012.

There will be an open mic period following the presentations.

The monthly gathering of readers and writers meets the second Tuesday of each month, 6:00-8:00 PM, at Cassava, 1333 Broadway in Longview. The events are free and open to the public.

Cassava offers a dinner menu for those who wish to enjoy a meal with the readings, as well as local wines and brews.

At the next WordFest event on Tuesday, July 11, 6:00-8:00 p.m., British-born author Hannah Dennison will read from her latest mystery, Murderous Mayhem at Honeychurch Hall.

Hannah is the author of The Vicky Hill Mysteries (Constable Crime) as well as the Honeychurch Hall Mysteries (Minotaur), both series set in the wilds of the Devonshire countryside. Hannah originally moved to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting. She has been an obituary reporter, an antique dealer, and a Hollywood story analyst.

Now living in Portland, she teaches mystery writing workshops at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program in Los Angeles, and has served on numerous judging committees for Mystery Writers of America and currently serves on the MWA Board of Directors for 2016-2018.

In her most recent mystery, a missing manuscript, a dead postmistress and the gruesome remains of a woman thought to have vanished during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, are uncannily connected in Murderous Mayhem at Honeychurch Hall, the fourth adventure in the mystery series featuring antique dealer Kat Stanford and her romance writer mother, Iris.

You can watch the Book Chat interview with Hannah here.

Cam Parvitee will be reading from the second book in her Black Dragons series. In Book One, a group of Tai Chi practitioners (most in their 60s and older) helped young teenagers in their community from being bullied by the Snakes, a street gang.

In Book Two the seniors who have now undertaken the care of the children, begin to wonder if they were crazy for accepting the challenge.

For much of her life, Cam has been involved with the activities of teenagers and young adults. She got the idea for this book series one evening during a Kung Fu class, when she, at 75, threw a teenaged “attacker” to the floor at her feet.

Alkaid Tsuki will be reading from Book Two of her Young Adult (YA) Liberation series entitled Hope Filled Moon.

The characters of the earlier book, Freedom’s New Moon, travel to the city of Lunaria, where they meet the fourth and final Sentry, a young man named Sol who conjures Angels. As their brotherhood continues to grow, difficult truths come to light and members have to choose whom to trust. The as yet unpublished series is currently a tetralogy.

Alkaid Tsuki is the pen name of Caleigh Maffett, a student at Lower Columbia College. Her short story, “Entanglement,” received an Honorable Mention in the Metamorphose Short Story Writing Contest, and will be published by Metamorphose in their fall issue.

There will be an open mic period following the presentations.

The monthly gathering of readers and writers meets the second Tuesday of each month, 6:00-8:00 PM, at Cassava, 1333 Broadway in Longview. The events are free and open to the public.

Cassava offers a dinner menu for those who wish to enjoy a meal with the readings, as well as local wines and brews.

For more information, contact Alan Rose at www. Alan-rose.com.

At the next WordFest event on Tuesday, June 13, 6:00-8:00 p.m., University of Oregon instructor Michael Copperman will read from his memoir, Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta, at Cassava Coffeeshop.

Michael left Stanford University for the Mississippi Delta in 2002, to join Teach for America, imagining that he would lift underprivileged children from the narrow horizons of their rural poverty. As an idealistic Asian American from the West Coast, he soon lost his bearings in a world sharply divided between black and white and found he had no idea what was required to help children navigate the considerable challenges they faced in their world. His desperate efforts to save child after child, he admits, were naïve, and he often found that he wasn’t able to give his students what they needed, sometimes with heartbreaking consequences.

Michael will be reading from his memoir of the experience and speak on what his students taught him about the meaning of teaching. His book has been featured on NPR’s “Think Out Loud,” and chapters have been anthologized in What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher (Norton), which will be used in teacher’s colleges across the country and as a text in all the composition classrooms of one of Mississippi’s largest public universities.

Michael teaches writing to low-income, first-generation students of diverse backgrounds at the University of Oregon.  His writing has appeared in The Sun, The Oxford-American, Boston Review, Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Unsaid  and Southword, among others. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, the Oregon Arts Council, Literary Arts, and Breadloaf Writers Conference.

Kathleen Lane will be reading short stories and flash fiction pieces from her recently completed story collection, Deaths I’ve Imagined.

Living in Portland, Oregon, Kathleen writes short fiction and stories for middle-grade and young adult readers. Her middle grade novel, The Best Worst Thing, was an Oregon Book Award finalist. Her short stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Swink Magazine, Forest Avenue Press and elsewhere, and will be appearing in Writer’s Digest and Los Angeles Review.

Through a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, she teaches writing workshops to kids dealing with anxiety, and also teaches writing through Oregon Literary Arts Writers-in-the-Schools program. With writer Margaret Malone, Kathleen hosts the art and literary event series, SHARE, a bi-monthly event in Portland that brings artists together to create in a shared space from a one-word prompt.

There will be an open mic period following the presentations at 7:45 pm.

The monthly gathering of readers and writers meets the second Tuesday of each month, 6:00-8:00 PM, at Cassava, 1333 Broadway in Longview. The events are free and open to the public.

Cassava offers a dinner menu for those who wish to enjoy a meal with the readings, as well as local wines and brews.

For more information, contact Alan Rose at www. Alan-rose.com.

Two writers of YA (Young Adult) mysteries will be reading from their debut novels at the next WordFest event on Tuesday, May 9, 6:00-8:00 p.m. at Cassava Coffeeshop.

Kelly Garrett will read from her novel, The Last To Die, published by Poisoned Pen Press in April 2017.

Harper is no saint, but she doesn’t deserve to die. When her teen burglary ring goes terribly wrong and one of her friends dies, she faces a moral dilemma that will make or break her–and if she makes the wrong choice, it will get her killed.

Sheryl Scarborough, an award-winning writer for children’s television, holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. To Catch A Killer is her debut novel, published by Tor Teen.

As a toddler, Erin Blake survived three days alongside the corpse of her murdered mother. Fourteen years later, Erin has ramped up her forensic hobby into a full-blown cold-case investigation. Now a new murder makes her certain she’s close to the truth, but all the evidence is pointing the authorities to Erin.

 
Kelly and Sheryl will also discuss “When writing is murder,” exploring the intricacies of writing mysteries for young adults, including plotting out the story and developing realistic characters.

There will be an open mic period following the presentations at 7:30 pm. People are welcome to read their writing for ten minutes each.

The monthly gathering of readers and writers meets the second Tuesday of each month, 6:00-8:00 PM, at Cassava, 1333 Broadway in Longview. The events are free and open to the public.

Cassava offers a dinner menu for those who wish to enjoy a meal with the readings, as well as local wines and brews.

For more information, contact Alan Rose at www. Alan-rose.com.

Mark is the author of six books, including The Green Age of Asher Witherow, named a #1 Indie Next selection by the American Booksellers Association, Lost Son, a biographical novel about Rainer Maria Rilke (the author of Letters to a Young Poet), Date of Disappearance, a collection of short stories, and Partisans, a dystopian work about unbridled surveillance, constant war, and technological upheaval, which was a finalist for the Flann O’Brien Award for Innovative Fiction. He recently edited and wrote the introduction to Funny-Ass Thoreau, a collection of humorous extracts from the writer of Walden.

Mark’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Tin House, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and he is a frequent contributor to the Books section of The Oregonian. He founded the independent literary press Atelier26, and is a contributing editor for Moss, a journal of contemporary literature from the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Portland, where he facilitates the Atelier26 Creative Writing Workshops and teaches at Literary Arts.

J.S.(Steve)Anderson will be reading from his novel, Book of Hours: Unholy Error, the second book in his trilogy featuring Brother Alphaios.

While recreating a resplendent fifteenth century Book of Hours as a gift for the pope, Brother Alphaios and archivist Inaki Arriaga discover ancient shreds of parchment hidden in its covers. They pursue the few haunting words that remain only to stumble into a battle between the Roman Church, which wants to destroy the parchment or bury it forever, and its owner, real estate billionaire Salton Motice who wants to use it for his own nefarious purposes.

Steve, who lives and writes in Longview, has a lifelong interest in Western religions, art and cultures.

Fred Hudgin will be reading from The Three Hour War, Book Two of his The End of Children series.

After some graduate students discover how to open a wormhole, an alert is sounded by detectors planted on the moon fifty thousand years ago by the species that raised humanity from apes to people. Because there is now no way to stop humans from developing starships using the wormhole technology and spreading their warlike attitudes and greed throughout the galaxy, humanity is selected for elimination by simply turning off their ability to have children.

Living in Ariel, Washington, Fred has been writing poetry and short stories since he took a Creative Writing class at Purdue University in 1967.  His short stories and poems have been published in Biker Magazine, on Poetry.Com, The Salal Review, The Scribbler, and in two anthologies, That Holiday Feeling, a collection of Christmas short stories, and Not Your Mother’s Book on Working for a Living.

Popular storyteller and WordFest favorite Ed Putka will host the evening.

There will be an open mic period following the presentations at 7:40 pm. People are welcome to read their writing for ten minutes each.

The monthly gathering of readers and writers meets the second Tuesday of each month, 6:00-8:00 PM, at Cassava, 1333 Broadway in Longview. The events are free and open to the public.

Cassava offers a dinner menu for those who wish to enjoy a meal with the readings, as well as local wines and brews.

For more information, contact Alan Rose at www. Alan-rose.com.