Minato, Amy

Amy helps students to express their creativity and to learn writing techniques through fun, non-threatening activities.

Project #1: Good Morning/Bad Morning
Students express emotion through different descriptions of an actual event.

Project #2: April Has Meringue Hair
Using a range of metaphors, students create collaborative descriptions for each month, illustrate them, and make a class calendar.

Project #3: He Went There
Step by step, starting with a boring sentence, students practice ways to enliven and enrich a piece until they have the beginnings of an interesting character, scene and plot. Everyone starts with the same sentence, but the results are wildly different!

Amy Minato is the author of The Wider Lens, published in 2004 by Ice River Press. Her poetry has been published in national and regional magazines, and included in From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry. She holds both an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon. Her poetry has been recognized with a 2003 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, and her prose with a Walden Fellowship. She currently teaches reading and writing workshops in the Portland area, but she thinks of the Wallowa Mountains as her home, and the Oregon landscape as her muse.