The first two weeks of September have been a glorious end to summer here at Storyknife. In fact, it’s been a year stuffed full of goodness.
In the beginning of the year, the board of Storyknife and I worked with the Foraker Group as part of the Pre-Development Program. We talked about dreams, goals, a vision for where Storyknife will grow, and the outcome was a strategic plan. Then we talked about budgets, costs, impact, constituents, and so much more and finally the outcome was a business plan that is sustainable.
I want to share the envisioned future of Storyknife from our strategic plan:
- Fostering women’s powerful and necessary voices
- Providing women a supportive community and the time and space to devote to writing
- Lending cultural weight to women’s writing
- Creating an environment of caring and hospitality
- Creating a bedrock upon which women writers feel secure in exploring difficult, experimental, and engaging work
- Providing a place that is beautiful, thoughtfully constructed, and nurturing
- Fostering a level of respect (cultural and personal) for each woman and her creative process
June rolled around and we began to host our 2018 fellows, Ching-In Chen, Sharbari Ahmed, and Casandra Lopez. Three extraordinary women writers that were chosen from 97 applicants. It’s hard to express how much it saddens me when the letters go out to say sorry, you were not chosen this year. There was not one woman writer who applied who did not deserve to have her voice respected, fostered, taken care of. And the Storyknife call for applicants did not reach even a fraction of the women writers who deserve a residency.
Over the next few months, we’ll be sending out newsletters to let folks know what’s in store and how you might help. So many exciting things are in the works, and we can’t wait to share them with you. One way you can help that takes almost no effort at all: please share our website, our Facebook page, our newsletter signup link with everyone you know that believes that women’s voices matter.
Thank you for all your support in the past and we look so forward to moving into the future together.
Sincerely,
Erin Hollowell, Executive Director Storyknife
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017).They are a Kundiman, Lambda and Callaloo Fellow and a member of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundations writing communities. Chen is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). Their work has appeared in The Best American Experimental Writing, The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. A poetry editor of the Texas Review, they currently teach creative writing at Sam Houston State University. 
Sharbari Ahmed’s fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Asian Pacific American Journal, Catamaran, Caravan Magazine, Inroads, and Wasafiri among others and is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly. She was on the writing team for Season One of the TV Series, “Quantico” on ABC. Most recently she wrote the screen adaptation of Mitali Perkin’s Middle Grade novel Rickshaw Girl. Her debut book The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai: Stories was released in November 2013 by Daily Star Books. She is a Tribeca All Access Fellow for her screenplay Raisins Not Virgins. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Manhattanville College and the Film Television MA Program at Sacred Heart University. She was born in Bangladesh and raised in New York, Connecticut and Ethiopia and lives in Darien, CT.
Casandra Lopez is a Chicana and California Indian (Cahuilla/Tongva/ Luiseño) writer who’s received support from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf and Jackstraw. She’s been selected for residencies with SAR and Hedgebrook. Her chapbook, Where Bullet Breaks was published by the Sequoyah National Research Center and her poetry collection Brother Bullet is forthcoming from University of Arizona press. She’s a founding editor of As Us and teaches at Northwest Indian College.
This post was written by Ruby Hansen Murray, Storyknife’s September 2017 resident fellow. All photographs taken by Ruby Hansen Murray. 
I’ve come to write, and I do. These are the weeks of hurricanes flooding Houston, slamming the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, sweeping Florida, and I speak with dear friends who live in that striking environment so unlike this one, but so similarly vulnerable to climate change. I am writing essays about the Osage homeland in the middle of the continent and organizing my novel with an emotional logic. But I’m also curious about the Kenai Peninsula where my husband’s family fished and which was the site of an early oil discovery in Alaska.
A week into September, the tourist and fishing season is over. There’s the tug to experience the area—the aquamarine waters and white breakers along the spit or the textures and scale of the glaciers across Kachemak Bay, over and against the views from my desk. Whether I sit in the cabin or drive to town or walk the spit, I’m rewarded. Sunlight glistens on the fur of a black bear that passes and two moose check out the moose-proof cage the gardener wrapped around a high-bush cranberry just outside my window. For most of the month, whether I stay home or explore the world around Homer, I’m in a dream state. The place, the generous friends I make, the opportunity to spend this dedicated time are synergistic and powerful.
Dear Friends of Storyknife,
