By
Jenn Lalime and Sara Guest
It is early 2005 in a cozy living room, steam
rising from cups of tea, women in a rough circle on couches, chairs, ottomans
and the floor. The facilitator, Emily Trinkaus—one of the original founders of
the VoiceCatcher collective—launches
a prompt. Pens fire up around the room and women start writing.
Later, when we share what we’ve written, we access
the raw materials of each other’s lives. And after a while, we start to realize
the writing being shared around the room is powerful. More powerful perhaps—or
at least in a different way—than the work we read in poetry and fiction
journals or yearly anthologies. “We’ve got to start capturing this stuff!” we
say. “We need to start sharing.”
From this shared impulse, the VoiceCatcher anthology (soon to be publishing its fifth issue) was
born. And the desire to feel connected to the authentic, powerful, emotional, raw collective voice we have been
hearing howled into living rooms all over Portland has kept us going all these
years.
We want fledgling writers who are afraid to put
their work in the world to have a logical place to send it. We want veteran
writers from the area to find it worthwhile to place their work with our
project.
And since the first year, that’s pretty much what
we’ve gotten back from the Portland women’s writing community. We’ve received
gorgeous, heartfelt letters from writers taking a first stab at owning their
collective voice. We’ve heard from women just moving to town looking for the
best way to get connected. We’ve had the pleasure of publishing Oregon Book
Award-winning poets alongside stories sent from Coffee Creek Correctional
Facility (the prison in Wilsonville housing the entire women’s prison
population in Oregon). Everything goes as long as it speaks to us.
Our submission window opens like a spring sidecar
on February 1 and closes on March 31st – just in time to get geared
up for heavy doses of reading in April and May while many of us are tending our
gardens. What women throughout the Portland, Oregon area have planted on the
page in the dark days of winter blooms into our sunrooms and kitchen tables.
We take submissions at our PO Box (below), and
also in-person at any of our spring readings. In addition to supporting authors
from the previous year’s book, these events remind our very large audiences
that the submission window is open --
and we encourage everyone to submit. (Please visit our website in January for a
full list of spring readings celebrating the current issue – VoiceCatcher 4).
Want to get involved? If you are a woman living in the Portland, Oregon area, send us the writing that’s hanging out in the dark clotted space on your desk, or in your dream journal, or on your hard-drive, or in your heart. We look forward to hearing from you.
VoiceCatcher submissions: February 1- March 31 at VoiceCatcher, PO Box 6064, Portland, OR 97228-6064.
More about VoiceCatcher at www.voicecatcher.org.
* * * * *
Sara Guest, a native mid-westerner, has been tripping the light wowtastic in Portland, Oregon since 2004.
A longtime producer and editor, Sara works as a program coordinator for
Write Around Portland and volunteers with Literary Arts and VoiceCatcher (currently as board chair). She writes poetry and fiction and is a voracious reader and lover of Powell's City of Books.
Jenn Lalime
is a northwest native, a writer and editor, a mother and a wife. She's
lucky to work with the following organizations to bring the words of
fellow writers out into the world: Portland Women Writers, VoiceCatcher, and Tin House Books. She thanks the universe every day for President
Obama whose presence in the White House gives her the peace of mind to
stay focused on her first and true love: reading great fiction.
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View all "Catching Voices" columns.
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