All winter long, I’ve been visiting the cabins at Storyknife, checking everything out, and they’ve been very dark, sleepy almost. But now, the rugs have been shaken out, fresh linens put on the beds, every part scrubbed and shined. The crew is back at Storyknife, preparing for the new season of writers that will begin April 1st.
In conjunction with this fresh start, we’ll have a second go at the Founder’s Fellowship Challenge. Just as she did last year, Dana Stabenow is issuing a challenge to match the fellowship and travel scholarship funds that she donates each year. Storyknife fellowships are $5500 to underwrite one writer while in residency. Dana also offers a $1000 scholarship to support the travel of one resident. We have several exciting new fellowships this year, as well as the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellow that will be awarded for a 2025 writer. If you’d like to read more about the other fellowships currently being offered you can check them out here.
Founder Dana Stabenow with September writers Su Hwang, Christina Berke, Joy Huntington, and Farnaz Fatemi.
If you’d like to sponsor a fellowship, please let me know at ehollowell@storyknife.org. Sponsors of a fellowship are encouraged to specify what kind of writer they’d like to support, name the fellowship, and when possible meet with their fellows. It’s a wonderful way to know that you’re making a difference in a woman writer’s life.
Starting today and through April, Dana is challenging us to raise $6,500 to match her annual donation. A donation in April not only honors Storyknife’s Founder and her continued support but ALSO will support a woman writer putting her heart on the page.
If you’d like to dedicate your donation to Dana, or to anyone else who has positively impacted your life, please let us know on the donation form.
We’re very excited to kick off the year, planting the seeds of good writing that will undoubtedly blossom into good reading for all of us and a more joyful and hopeful world.
Storyknife Writers Retreat, a nonprofit founded in 2016 and located in Homer, Alaska, hosts residencies for women writers from Alaska, across the United States, and internationally. Storyknife’s mission is to give women writers the time and space to explore their craft without distraction, seeking especially to elevate the work of women from historically excluded communities. Storyknife hosts over 50 women each year in their beautiful facility overlooking the Aleutian Mountain Range and Cook Inlet. Women writers have two or four weeks to live and work in their own cabin and are provided with gorgeous meals eaten together in the main house.
The Rona Jaffe Foundation (www.ronajaffefoundation.org) will be sponsoring a fellowship each year to be awarded to a promising emerging woman writer exhibiting the highest quality work and the need for a residency opportunity at this particular moment in her literary career. Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellows may apply in any genre. For the purpose of this fellowship, “emerging writers” are defined as those who are as yet unpublished or who are just completing their first book. Writers may be considered if they have a book under contract or have published chapbooks.
The fellowship will underwrite expenses for a four-week residency and provide the fellow with a $1,500 stipend which may be used to cover travel expenses, lost income, child care, or other necessities.
The Rona Jaffe Foundation’s legacy of supporting emerging women writers began in 1995. Their work acknowledges the difficulties some of the most talented women have in overcoming obstacles in finding time to write and gaining attention. For over 27 years, the Rona Jaffe Foundation has supported women writers through their Writers’ Awards program (1995-2020), by sponsoring fellowships held at distinguished cultural and educational nonprofit institutions throughout the country, and supporting vital literary nonprofits. Storyknife Writers Retreat is honored to partner with an organization that has helped so many women build successful writing lives by offering opportunities, encouragement, and financial support.
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow will be awarded starting for the Storyknife Writers Retreat 2025 residency cohort. Applications for residency will open on July 1, 2024. For more information and to apply, see the Storyknife Writers Retreat website.
Welcome to the end of February…. Good thing it’s a leap year, because we’re gonna need that extra day to get ready for all of the goodness that’s set to arise from Storyknife this year.
I just got back from four days at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference that was held in Kansas City this year. I try to attend each year to stay up to date with other writing residency directors as well as touch base to support Storyknife alums who are presenting or releasing new books. Honestly, it is so heartening to see members of Storyknife cohorts walking around with each other, offering bookmarks for their new books, meeting each other at signing tables, and just generally be part of the larger Storyknife community (especially when I set the get-together early in the morning for breakfast).
Storyknife is doing exactly what Dana imagined it might: providing time and space for writers to devote to their craft AND creating a community of writers that support each other long after their residency is over.
Now comes to the more disappointing news. I spent time talking with several women-led presses and women-led writing organization, and I learned that giving to nonprofit organizations that serve women is very low. According to the Women & Girls Index report, only 1.81% of philanthropic giving in 2020 went to women’s and girls’ organizations, and of that 1.81%, the lowest amount went to arts and culture organizations that serve women.
Oof. Those figures hurt. Now, more than ever, the voices of women need to be supported. Women’s stories, poems, essays, memoirs, plays, and films can help our culture move forward with greater dignity for all.
Please look forward to hearing about the amazing writers who will be at Storyknife in 2024. And if you have a bit to help push that 1.81% up, you can donate in small monthly increments and it makes a huge different to the women writers you support.
Meanwhile, we’ll be getting ready to welcome the first cohort on April 1st to the magic that is the Storyknife community.
Welcome to January – new Board Members and Friends of Storyknife!
Storyknife is welcoming in the new year with three new board members! We are excited for new ideas and leadership of these three amazing people:
Esther Cetina
Born in Anchorage, Alaska, Esther Cetina is of Alutiiq and Filipino descent. Her mother is from Old Harbor, AK and father from Oregon. She is married to an Army Veteran and together they have 4 children, three boys and one girl. With over two decades in the non-profit healthcare sector, she has seamlessly transitioned through various roles, including serving as the Director of External Affairs at Old Harbor Native Corporation and the Administrator of Medical Services at Southcentral Foundation and currently is the CEO & Founder of Rising Solutions, consulting firm. As a consultant, she works with her clients in partnership, organizing comprehensive problem-solving strategies and developing strategic plans, ensuring alignment of business objectives, opportunities and driving sustainable growth.
Esther holds a Master of Science in Counseling Psychology from Alaska Pacific University, complemented by a bachelor’s in human services and Psychological Studies. Her dedication and impact were emphasized in 2017 when she was honored with receiving the “Top 40 Under 40” award from the Alaska Journal of Commerce. Adding to her accomplishments, she co-facilitated the “Charting the Future of Primary Care” training at Harvard Medical School.
Claudia Mauro
Claudia Mauro is a poet, science writer, and the founding director of the nonprofit literary publisher, Whit Press. She is the recipient of two Seattle Arts Commission CityArtist Grants, and a Wyoming Arts Council Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry.
She is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle, PENAmerica, and The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. An alumna and former board member of Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, she has also served as a judge for the Lambda Book Awards.
Her books include; Stealing Fire and Reading the River (Whiteaker Press 1999, 2004), both Lambda Book Award finalists. She was a presenter at the inaugural TEDxSeattle speaking on the importance of independent media. Claudia also has extensive experience as a backcountry pilot in Alaska and was employed for over 20 years as a field science tech for the Alaska Dept. of Fish & Game, and for NOAA as Marine Survey Tech crew on their research and survey vessels.
Dawn Peppinger
Dawn Peppinger is a born and raised Alaskan Native. She retired from the US Postal Service, Alaska District, after a 38 year career starting as a clerk then promoted to various management positions within the Marketing and Operations Departments. Now retired, she is involved in volunteer work, traveling, beading, sewing and discovering new craft hobbies. She enjoys reading many genres and appreciates the opportunity to support Storyknife’s vision.
We’d like to take this moment to reflect back on the amazing generosity of the folks who supported the writers of Storyknife last year. We’ve updated the Friends of Storyknife page to honor those who donated at all levels. Honestly, as I read over the list, I am overcome by the connections on it – alums of Storyknife and their friends and families; longtime donors who’ve now become like family to us; fans of Dana and her work; donors who have been introduced to Storyknife by other supporters; and the ripples that go out every time a writer crosses the threshold back home and tells about their time at Storyknife overlooking Cook Inlet.
You may be tired of hearing me say it, but thank you, thank you, thank you. None of this is possible without the generosity of the donors.
Finally, today has been set aside to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his work in the world. Rather than posting a quote from the large archive of Dr. King’s speeches and essays, we suggest that each of us consider the concrete actions that we can take, especially in this time, to evoke the mission of the King Center: to create a just, humane, equitable and peaceful world by applying Dr. King’s nonviolent philosophy and methodology. Let us also remember the work of Coretta Scott King, an author, activist, and civil rights leader who was truly a force in her own right. What can each of us do today and going forward to carry on Dr. King and Coretta Scott King’s legacy?
Here’s to 2024, a new year of wonderful writers having the time and space to make the world better with their words! Thank you to all of our supporters, our wonderful community of alums, our board, and the staff of Storyknife!
In Alaska, we are particularly attuned the light. Or, this time of year, to the darkness. And so we greet the winter solstice and the return of the light with upraised faces and hope.
2023 has been a difficult one in the world, for nations, communities, and individuals. There have been moments of joy and happiness, and moments of devastation and horror. As part of the holiday season, those of us at Storyknife want to, for this time, focus on gratitude and hope for 2024.
Here are some of the things we are grateful for:
52 women writers who spent a total 1,176 days in residence at Storyknife in 2023. They wrote, napped, planned, and gathered to form a community.
224 individuals this year donated to support the writers of Storyknife. Thank you for believing that women writers deserve the time and space to devote to their craft!
Because of your generosity, Storyknife raised enough funds to meet the $50,000 challenge grant! This will be an incredible boost to the beginning of 2024. There is no way to overstate our gratitude to the amazingly generous supporter who offered the challenge and the wonderful people who stepped up to help meet it.
All of warmth, kindness, enthusiasm, and humor of the writers that were in residence in 2023.
All of the excitement and pure joy of the writers who are scheduled to be in residence at Storyknife in 2024.
The entire community of Storyknife. Storyknife is a new organization. Sometimes Dana and I can’t believe that it’s only been three years that writers have been in the Storyknife cabins and meeting around the table in Eva’s House for dinner. In the past eight years, the Storyknife community has built six cabins and the main house, nurtured 128 writers, and helped create a solid foundation upon which the organization can grow into the future.
May the new year bring peace and light and room for stories that heal and generate hope.
It’s winter at Storyknife, a time for celebrating and snuggling up on the sofa to read a good book. And if you need some last minute gifts, might we suggest any of these amazing titles by Storyknife alums?
American Bastard: Jan Beatty’s lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America, traveling across literal continents—and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups—and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh.
Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.
An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp is part social critique, part imaginative biography of enigmatic painter Agnes Martin, and part treatise on the multiplicities of the natural world.
Curating the House of Nostalgia: Kersten Christianson’s collection of poems grounded in far-flung northern settings that weave along stretches of pitted road, open spaces, and the interior landscapes of the unforeseen circumstances of bereavement and moving forward.
Rainbow, Rainbow by Lydi Conklin: In this exuberant, prize-winning collection, queer characters seek love and connection in hilarious and heart-rending stories that reflect the complexity of our current moment.
Moon and the Mars by Kia Corthron: A young girl of African American and Irish descent navigates life in the impoverished yet ever-vibrant Five Points district of New York City, while the nation marches to Civil War.
Injustice, humor, and resilience collide in Stephanie Cotsirilos’ first novella, My Xanthi — when a Greek immigrant woman’s wartime secrets teach a criminal defense lawyer about love’s triumph over inhumanity.
Paradise is Jagged: In this extraordinary collection, Ann Fisher-Wirth looks levelly at mortality, grief, and memory, and reckons with what it is to be urgently alive, bringing her incisive nuance to subjects ranging from the loss of a beloved sister to Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary to our imperiled natural world to the comforts of marital love. – Catherine Pierce, Mississippi Poet Laureate
Best Be Prepared by Gwen Florio: A coastal town dispute over a tsunami-evacuation tower that could block lucrative new development has deadly consequences in this environmental thriller.
Ghost Forest: Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung weaves memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese Canadian “astronaut” family.
Autumn Song: Essays on Absence by Patrice Gopo invites readers into one Black woman’s experiences encountering absences, seeing beyond the empty spaces, and grasping at the glimmers of glory that remain.
Set in Hilo, Hawai’i, Jasmin Iolani Hakes’ Hula is a sweeping saga of tradition, culture, family, history, and connection that unfolds through the lives of three generations of women—a tale of mothers and daughters, dance and destiny.
Nocturne: Set in a technicolour world of dreams, ghosts, classical music, and Key West storms, Jodie Hollander’s compelling second collection charts the emotional journey of the daughter of a professional classical pianist.
Where My Umbilical Is Buried: Amanda Galvan Huynhweaves a code-switching tapestry that unabashedly confronts, complicates, and celebrates the lineages and experiences. These are intricate poems that manifest healing and dreaming for the self and future ancestors. — Anthony Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha
Slow Scrape by Tanya Lukin Linklater: Drawing on documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts, this book cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowing.
回 / Returnby Emily Lee Luan: Through the recurrence of memory, myth, and grief, 回 / Return captures the elusory language of sorrow and solitude that binds Taiwanese diasporic experience.
Ocean Mother: Using poetry to weave together striking narratives of family, environment, Indigenous identity, decolonial love, and her Chamoru culture, Arielle Taitano Lowe goes on a journey inward and overseas as she explores the relationships between culture and identity, colonialism and inherited trauma, sense of place and generational healing.
Love and Other Rituals: Selected Stories: At home in the Philippines, and abroad in the US and New Zealand, the characters of Monica Macansantos’s debut story collection search for a sense of belonging and understanding, and contemplate the tentative nature of home.
Five Reports of FugitiveDust: In Mary Mercier’s debut full-length poetry collection, she merges her scientific background and poetic skills to share with us how she experiences nature—as a part of it, rather than a mere onlooker.
Brace for Impact is Gabe Montesanti’s memoir about joining an elite roller derby team, healing from family dysfunction, and embracing a queer identity.
Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry – Entries by Ruby Hansen Murray and Keetje Kuipers. Blending art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations.
In membery, Preeti Kaur Rajpal writes the memory of her family’s expulsion from their homeland during Historical India’s Partition, threaded with her experiences as a Sikh American woman during the post-9/11 era.
The Death of a Jaybird: Essays on Mothers and Daughters and the Things They Leave Behind, Jodi M. Savage’s deeply empathetic and often humorous collection of essays explores the author’s ever-changing relationships with her grandmother and mother, through sickness and health, as they experience the joys and challenges of Black American womanhood.
Artie and the Wolf Moon:Olivia Stephen’s middle-grade graphic novel follows 8th grader Artie Irvin as she uncovers her hidden werewolf heritage.
Storyknife Writers Retreat’s mission is to provide women with the time and space to devote to their writing. Thank you to all of the people who make Storyknife possible. We so appreciate our community and its dedication to the mission.
I bet that you read To Kill a Mockingbird when you were in school. For a long time, it seemed like it was on every required reading list. The novel made a huge impact on many students, leading to discussions about empathy and equality. And even though the book has come under warranted scrutiny recently for approaching racism from one direction, the white outsider, it certainly has provided a jumping off point for teachers and students to discuss the interconnectedness of race, class, and gender.
If it were not for the generosity of two friends, Harper Lee would never have had the opportunity to write it. Michael and Joy Brown gave Lee an incredible holiday present in 1956, a year’s salary so that she could take off from her day gig as an airline ticket agent.
To Kill a Mockingbird was so successful that Lee was able to repay the Browns for their gift. But in all honesty, the gift was more than money. It was an emblem of support – that Harper Lee had something to say to the world and that it was worth giving her the time and space to write it.
And so #GivingTuesday has arrived with the barrage of emails from important organizations that you’ve supported. We’re sliding in here as well to say that your support of Storyknife makes it possible for new stories to come into the world that change our culture. A book like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes are Watching God, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.
To the many people who have already supported the women writers of Storyknife, thank you. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for validating women writers, for believing that the work they do is important for them individually and for our culture as a whole.
May your December be filled with time for you to read and reflect. We hope that the work of many women writers makes its way into your hands and hearts.
Please celebrate these amazing writers in residence at Storyknife in 2023
The 2023 residency season has wrapped up. The cabins are now dreaming of the writers who will create in them next year.
But the office of Storyknife is not closed. Oh no, we are already planning for 2024. Applicants who received invitations are responding. End of the season maintenance is being planned. And end of the year fundraising is shifting into high gear.
It takes a considerable amount of work to raise the money so that the women writers of Storyknife have to pay nothing for their stay. In 2024, we have eleven travel scholarships, and seven fellowships (with three more in the works).
The true heroes of Storyknife are not Dana, our founder, and the staff. The true heroes are the donors who help put food on the table, keep the lights on, pay for maintenance of the buildings. We are in the midst of a $50,000 challenge match. That means if you support Storyknife in your end of year giving, your donation will go twice as far.
You also have the opportunity to give just a bit each month. Recurring donations are so helpful, and spreading your support out over the year helps both Storyknife and the donor.
So, please consider donating to support the women writers of Storyknife. We know that you believe that women need the time and space to devote to their work. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.
Let me tell you about the blessing. I sent letters to the women writers who have been selected to be in residence in 2024. It’s joyous because I know that Storyknife will be a place that those writers will feel cherished and productive.
At the same time, I sent out letters to the women writers who are on the waitlist. Even though it’s not the best news that they could receive, there is still a chance that they’ll spend some time at Storyknife next year. We always have writers from the waitlist who get an opportunity because someone else couldn’t accept the offer for a residency. So there is still hope.
Let me tell you about the sadness. I sent letters to the women writers who were not selected for either a residency or on the waitlist. We had 985 women apply this year for a 2024 residency. You now get a sense of the number of letters that went out with disappointing news. And here’s the worst part – these women writers need the time and space to devote to their writing. They have worthy stories to tell. Their voices are important. We just don’t have space for everyone who applies.
Each year I feel a great sadness for these women who receive letters with discouraging news. I’ve been one of them, advocating for myself and not receiving an opportunity. Please know that I’m sending up my love, my care, my hope that every woman writer keeps putting her words on the page. That everyone who applies to Storyknife knows that their stories are the way we change the world. And that women’s stories are needed now more than ever.
Storyknife Writers Retreat 