two exceptional writers chosen
for north coast writers' residencies
Two writers, Deborah Williams and Sarah Buckmaster, have been selected to participate in the second annual North Coast Writer’s Residency, which was developed collaboratively by the Astoria Writer’s Guild and Astoria Visual Arts. The residency program offers both established and emerging writers a unique opportunity to launch new endeavors, revise works in progress, or conclude longstanding projects. The program seeks to provide writers with writing time and space in an idyllic setting: the Spotted Goat Cottage on the Long Beach Peninsula, which features panoramic views of Willapa Bay, Long Island, and the Willapa Hills.
Sarah Buckmaster intends to complete her first novel during her residency. "I have spent the last few years working on my novel. I have stopped, started, re-started, stopped and started again. This residency would provide me with the opportunity to focus deeply and finish a first draft of my first-ever novel. This residency would provide me with the opportunity to focus deeply and finish a first draft of my first ever novel. To spend a week ‘living’ as a writer, to get the chance to discuss my novel... and share my writing with others would be a meaningful step into the writing life I so strongly desire."
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Deborah Williams, a professor of Literature at NYU Abu Dhabi, will continue work on Hot and Strange: Reinventions of Self and School in the Middle East, which combines the story of her midlife move to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, with the story of NYU Abu Dhabi, the first four-year liberal-arts college in the Gulf. She wrote in her application: "As I’ve come to feel at home in 'Arabia,' I have not only had to rethink my sense of self but also think about what it means to be progressive, civilized, feminist, and to consider how we define terms like expat, migrant, home. At the same time, I’ve been part of NYUAD’s attempts to reinvent global liberal arts education and watched as Abu Dhabi itself attempts a reinvention, into something other than the gas pump to the world."
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Both writers will give public readings at the AVA Center for the Arts during their respective residencies, the dates of which are still in flux due to COVID-19.
