Radio Poet Elizabeth Austen Comes to Doe Bay

What does it take to make poems come alive in performance? Commitment, practice… and some skills that poet, performer and public radio producer Elizabeth Austen will teach in this interactive workshop to be held Sunday, April 10 from 1 to 4 p.m. at Doe Bay Resort.

Performing poems for an audience doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but it can be learned, and the exploration can help you become a better reader and writer. The process involves becoming intimate with the poem-fortunately, it turns out that this is most pleasurable work and extremely useful for revision.

This three-hour workshop will provide concrete tools to improve your reading skills and public presence. We’ll explore the physical nature of language, and practice embodying the poem — backing it up with breath, voice and body. Applicable to all styles of poetry. Bring your own poems or poems by another.

Later on April 10, Austen will read from her book, Every Dress a Decision, at 7  pm. at the Doe Bay Cafe.

Every Dress a Decision, just released by Blue Begonia Press, tests the boundaries between the known and the unknowable, as tensions reverberate among desire, family, spirituality and identity. At the center of it all is a woman struggling to absorb the sudden death of a brother and confront their complicated past.

Jane Hirshfield describes Austen’s poems as “powerfully original in both vision and voice. This book welcomes into our view a writer of language-substance, awake ear, and revealed-and revealing-heart.”

Elizabeth Austen is also the author of  two chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and Where Currents Meet, part of the 2010 Toadlily Press quartet, Sightline.

She is a dynamic performer of her own and others’ poems, and has been featured at the Skagit River Poetry Festival, Richard Hugo House Literary Series,  Bumbershoot and elsewhere. She frequently teaches the art of poetry aloud, believing that “something magical is possible in a performance that doesn’t happen anywhere else-something electric, immediate, and entirely ephemeral, an exchange between performer and audience that is fluid and a little bit dangerous.”

For more than 10 years, Elizabeth has produced literary programming for KUOW, 94.9, one of Seattle’s NPR affiliates, introducing recordings of Pacific Northwest literary events and interviewing local and national poets.

She served as the Washington “roadshow” poet for 2007, giving readings and  workshops in rural areas around the state.  More information at elizabethausten.wordpress.com/