The Figurative Association Symposium's keynote lecture is by Kim Stafford, whose talk is titled "Clay in the Writer's Mind, Words in the Sculptor's Hand".

Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft (University of Georgia Press). He has been a writer in residence at the Pacific NW College of Art, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. To read his poems, view his poetry films, or listen to his songs, please visit his website:

My Dream of the People of Clay

Kim Stafford

It was far off in the mountains,
a school afire in crimson and gold.
Surreal confections clogged the town—

museum of Jesus, crooked mansion of belief,
hellbender tavern, and the flying car.
But we had gathered where the fire-

cave did genesis for our kind.
For when the brick door fell away
a girl gave birth to geese,

a rabbit woman laid her sleeping
head upon a man, dark festive
children set sail in a bureau boat,

and an old man, cousin to the crone
consort of Krishna, felt his
skin turn silver in hilarity.

We stood together at evening—
some speaking, those others utterly still
but magically alert, attending

with sacred patience to what was
left unsaid in the world of exile
far outside our precious dream.