Lewis’ Orcas Island Writers Festival Benefits Orcas Community

Barbara Lewis, founding director of the Orcas Island Writers Festival

Orcas Island Writers Festival runs Friday, Sept. 17 through Sunday, Sept. 19

For the past three years, Barbara Lewis has been “basically experimenting” with the idea of a nationally-recognized writing program centered on Orcas Island.

In 2008, Lewis, former director of a children’s art center in Virginia, decided to take a leap of faith and start a Writers Festival on Orcas Island. Fresh from graduation at the Vermont College Masters in Fine Arts program, she had the commitment of top-notch writing instructors to come to Orcas Island.

In true Orcas Island fashion of sharing your own gifts, Lewis structured the festival to help writers write, whether uncertain beginners or seasoned authors.  The value of exploring and critiquing with other serious writers benefits the 100-plus festival participants in a way that reading for family and friends never can.

The Orcas Island Writers Festival was created “as a way to enrich and connect readers and writers through classes, lectures, workshops, and the natural beauty of Orcas Island,” says Lewis.

She organized a cadre of ambitious, hard-working Orcas Island “expressives,” her “Writing Gurus” to handle the details of the 3-day festival, all the while staying on top of the minutiae and developments of mounting a writers’ festival. Says Lewis, “I have to know all these things; they’re not just something I can turn over to someone else.”

She formed a non-profit and applied for funding from the Orcas Island Community Foundation to support the Festival, and received $1,000 from an anonymous donor. She engaged the facilities at Camp Moran, and the festival was initiated on Labor Day Weekend, 2008.

The 2008 festival in the woods at Camp Moran hums with the creative work and warm interchanges among festival participants, both islanders and visitors from across the country:

• Writers and teachers Ellen Lesser (fiction), Diane Lefer (memoir and fiction), Matthew Goodman (non-fiction), Nancy Canyon and Peggy Shumaker (poetry and revision) instruct classes;
• Local writers Paul Owen Lewis, Michele Griskey, Holly Hughes, Sam Green  and Karen Fisher contribute on topics such as “What Picture Books Teach Us About Plot,” “Finding and Telling the Past,” “The Cobbling of Arts and Politics” and “Writing in the Wild;”
• Evening reading with refreshments – delicious blackberry tarts – round off the weekend.

But our fickle Northwest weather was damp and chilly, and the distance to town over Flaherty’s Hill was an obstacle to fully enjoying Orcas Island.

And so, for its second year, Lewis moved the festival to various locales in Eastsound. In 2009, the festival was supported by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant, for the “Big Read,” a community-wide program focused on Zora Neale Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Says Lewis, “In 2009, we tried to grow big enough to get a grant and employ an assistant.” The assistant was Heather Devine, Lewis’ daughter and a recent MFA graduate from Bennington College. She set up a bookkeeping system, a website, online registration and publicity for the Writers Festival.

The NEA grant came with some hefty requirements, which Lewis carried out wholeheartedly, bringing in artists of varied genres and engaging the community in reading and discussing Hurston’s book. The Olga Symphony, Martin Lund, Carolyn Cruso, Margie Doyle and Dustin Fox joined instructors Deb Lund, Ellen Lesser, Matthew Goodman, Jody Gladding, Nance Van Winckel, Diane Lefer and Matthew Goodman, and musician-historian Al Young

Evenings at the 2009 Festival included programs at Orcas Center from Thursday through Sunday, with music, dance, drama and poetry, as well as readings from “The Fabulous Five Faculty.”

“Last year was really hard,” said Lewis. “I’m not a big detail person, but a vision person: I want to write!” So this year, the Festival board decided to make the event “smaller and do what we could.” With the assistance of Ed Wilson, Anita Holladay, Michele Griskey-Watson and Sandi Thompson, Lewis has planned another weekend festival, with workshops conducted by

• Sue Silverman teaching memoirs; Lewis describes Silverman, the author of several memoirs, as an artist in “Fearless Confession” (also the title of one of her books);
• David Jauss; The Director of the Vermont College MFA, Jauss is a short story writer and the author of Black Maps and Crimes of Passion.
• Nance Van Winckel, award-winning author;Van Winckel will again be leading Jumpstart! Classes, which were especially popular with San Juan Islanders last year.

While at this time, the workshop classes with Jauss and Silverman are nearly full, registration is still open for the “Jumpstart!” classes facilitated by Nance Van Winckel.

The Jumpstart! writing classes teach how to focus and enliven poetry and prose writing. Each day’s class pinpoints and exercises different essential elements of writing. One class can be taken as a stand-alone class, or participants can come for all three, as a three-day series. Those who purchase a Jumpstart! ticket have admission to the lectures and panels for that day, as well. The Jumpstart! classes can be taken instead of a workshop, but not in addition to the workshop.

This year, the Jumpstart! classes will give particular attention to mixed-genre forms, a particularly lively area of writing today. Jumpstarters will discuss prose poems, flash fiction, and beyond-the-page visual/verbal genres. They will engage in writing exercises, as well, using the different forms, and sharing individual work with the group.

An evening with the writers, and music provided by Gene Nery, is planned for Saturday, Sept. 18 at the Orcas Center; admission is open to all by donation.

Panels and lectures will take place according to the following schedule:

Friday, September 17, 2010

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Workshops will be held in the Victorian Room of the Outlook Inn and the Madrona Room at Orcas Center. Smaller workshops will be held in the Eastsound Fire Hall and the OPAL meeting room off Lovers Lane and Enchanted Forest Road.

Lewis’ original inspiration was “to create an entity that could continue after I was finished,” she says. She longs to spend more time as a writer – writing – than continuing to oversee the logistics of the festival. Now a challenging three-year old, Lewis openly seeks the involvement of the Orcas Island business community in supporting the festival.

“Lance Evans and Michel Marshall of the Office Cupboard [Orcas Chamber of Commerce Executive Director and Board President, respectively] have been very supportive of the idea that the island can benefit from festivals; that the Writers Festival can bring people to the island.

“They’ve calculated that festival participants would bring in a minimum of $400 for each island visitor to island businesses: 100 people would bring $40,000 over and above festival costs,” says Lewis.

She praises her board with “connecting the dots,” and “helping in all the areas I’m not strong in – I couldn’t have done it without them,” she says. “But we all feel there are not enough of us.”

“At this point, we have the architecture in place and we’ve come together as organization; we have a cache of great instructors that will come to the Orcas Island Writers Festival.

“The community needs to support and thank the people that have brought the festival to Orcas Island.”

Currently, most arts education is connected to an established institution – such as Hugo House in Seattle, the Skagit Poetry Festival, the Whidbey Writers Festival, says Lewis. “The island either needs to own this or it needs to shift into a different animal.” She suggests partnerships with collective individuals in San Juan Island or with an institution.

For now, Lewis is planning to use 2011 to connect with institutions for funding  and to enlist more board members for the Orcas Island Writers Festival. “The Festival needs not just money, but volunteers to make this happen.”

She considers that the Orcas Island Writers Festival might shift to a writers workshop or quieter retreats, “but that’s the future,” she says.

Though she recognizes that seasonal contributions are the nature of an arts non-profit, and feels that she’s “done a pretty good job working with my downtime; we’ve had lots of company and are learning to sail,” still she describes her time organizing the Writers Festivals as “roller-skating backwards speaking Latin.”

Lewis says, “I’m feeling good about how the year’s played out, and looking forward to this year’s festival.

“I’m happy but realistic.”

Orcas Island Writers Festival runs Friday, Sept. 17 through Sunday, Sept. 19. People can come for one day or all three or combination, register online at www.orcasislandwritersfestival.com or call Lewis at 360-317-4383.

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