SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
Creative Writing Retreat with Nick Jaina
Nick’s first Summer Art Camp workshops went so well that we are adding another workshop. This time in Artist-In-Residence style in which the entire lodge is set aside for students in this workshop and all students may book a room in the lodge for $50 a night.
Mon Sept 12 th – Thurs Sept 15th 10am – 1pm or 2pm – 5pm
This set of workshops focuses on all the good things that writing can do for your mental and emotional state, how it can bring you closer to people, and how it can help you understand the world. Rather than just trying to make something marketable, we will work on discovering the interesting, funny, and wonderful ideas that are sitting inside of us.
Students sign up for the workshop and then pick the time slot they prefer.
Sign up for 1 day or all 4. Pick one time slot for each day.
We are offering Writer Retreat prices for any suite in the lodge: $150 for the week or $50 a night (potentially shared accommodations). Students do not have to stay at the Sou’wester to take any of these classes.
Nick Jaina is a musician and author from Portland, Oregon. His book Get It While You Can is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Creative Non-Fiction. He has taught writing workshops for ten years at Pendleton Rock Camp.
Cost $100 for all four days or $30 each day.
Please bring a laptop or pen and paper. Please bring a sack lunch and/or snack. Hot tea and coffee provided. Workshop for students ages 15+. All skill levels welcome. Max # of students:10 (5 in each session, morning or afternoon.)
Please RSVP souwesterfrontdesk@gmail.com or 360 – 642 – 2542.
Call the Sou’wester to book your stay – all lodge rooms have been set aside for this retreat.
We are located at 3728 J Place, Seaview, WA 98644
Clay Wheels & Striped Shirts: Skateboarding Films from the 1960s
Stephen Slappe is an artist and professor based in Portland, Oregon. Slappe’s work has exhibited and screened internationally in venues such as Centre Pompidou-Metz (France), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, The Horse Hospital (London), The Sarai Media Lab (New Delhi), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), and The Karachi Biennial (Pakistan). Slappe is an Associate Professor at Pacific Northwest College of Art where he created a Video & Sound department that focuses on experimental media production. He also operates an ongoing archival media project called Dead Media Hour, connecting neglected recordings of the past to present times.
Films will be shown in the Lodge Living Room. This screening is free & open to the public.
Hanna has played countless shows in Portland, OR and has become a part of the close knit community of West Coast artists. Hanna recently returned from touring overseas with the music agency Blue House Music which manages artists such as The Shook Twins John Craigie, Marty O’Reilly, Jeffrey Martin, Anna Tivel, and several others. She plans to record an album this Autumn.
Esmé Patterson is songwriter, gambler, singer, lover, thinker and explorer. She began as a member of the Denver Folk Pop septet, Paper Bird, and has written two records as a solo act including All Princes, I and her second and most recent release, Woman to Woman, which is a concept album of responses from female characters in a broad range of well known love songs. The Guardian called it “defiant and witty”, the New York Times found her voice “wiry and candid” with songs that “hint at mystery and mortality”. Audiotree touts “By putting herself in the minds of characters like Jolene, Eleanor Rigby, and Billie Jean, Patterson has crafted a witty, dark, and intimate twist on the popular tracks.” Esmé performs in multiple incarnations. She adds members to raise the volume and cadence of her tunes but remains powerful alone. Patterson is a magnetic performer and has appeared on the Leno, Conan and Letterman programs. Her co-writing with Shakey Graves led to sold out shows nationwide and millions of downloads of their collaborations. Esmé lives in Portland, Oregon, happily small under tall trees.
** Currently, this is scheduled not as a public event, but a live stream from the outdoor stage at The Sou’wester (weather permitting). If you are a guest staying with us, the show may be audible. *
(Live Stream) Jeffrey Martin at The Sou’wester
Jeffrey Martin:
As a babe Jeffrey Martin sought out solitude as often as he could find it. He’s always been that way, and he has never understood the whole phenomenon of smiling in pictures, although he is a very happy guy. One night in middle school he stayed up under the covers with a flashlight and a DiscMan, listening to Reba McEntire’s ‘That’s the Night that the Lights Went Out in Georgia’ on repeat until the DiscMan ran out of batteries. That night he became a songwriter, although he didn’t actually write a song until years later. After high school he spent a few years distracting himself from having to gather up the courage to do what he knew he had to do.
Eventually he found his way to a writing degree, and then a teaching degree. He wrote most days like his life depended on it, all sorts of things, not just songs, but songs too. He fell in love with teaching high school English, which was fantastic because he never thought he’d actually come to truly love it. His students were fierce and unstoppable forces of noise and curiosity, and for all that they took from him in sleep and sense, they gave him a hundred times back in sparks and humility.
All the while he was also playing truckloads of music. There was one weekend where he flew to LA while grading essays on the plane, played two shows, and then flew back home, still grading essays, and woke up to teach at 5 am on Monday morning. It was around this time he started wondering if such a life was sustainable.
Alas, music, the tour life, was a constant raccoon scratching at the back door. Jeffrey spent nights on end sitting up in bed, and then sitting on the front porch, staring off into the dark, wondering if he could bear to leave teaching to go on tour full time. Eventually his brain caught up with what his guts had known for months. With tears in his eyes he announced to his students that he wouldn’t be back the following year, and that he didn’t feel right hollering at them to chase their dreams at all cost if he wasn’t going to do the same.
Jeffrey Martin tours full time now. He is always making music, and he is always coming through your town. He misses teaching like you might miss a good old friend who you know you’ll meet again.
Jeffrey has put out bunches of music since 2009, but he’s most proud of the more recent stuff. He’s fortunate to be a part of the great and loving family that is Fluff and Gravy Records in Portland, OR. “One Go Around,” which released in October 2017, is his 3rd full length album. At his luckiest, he’s shared shows with the likes of Sean Hayes, Gregory Alan Isakov, Courtney Marie Andrews, Jeffrey Foucault, Joe Pug, Peter Mulvey, Amanda Shires, Sean Rowe, Tracy Grammer, David Wilcox, and others.
He currently lives in Portland, OR but feels lately that it has become a secret that someone figured out how to monetize. And since he has no money of any kind, everything beautiful about the city is marred by the quiet ticking of a countdown toward the day that he’ll have to find somewhere to live that doesn’t require a steady bleeding fortune.
** Currently, this is scheduled not as a public event, but a live stream from the outdoor stage at The Sou’wester (weather permitting). If you are a guest staying with us, the show may be audible. *
Mike Coykendall: Live Stream presented by Sou’wester Arts
(Live Stream) Mike Coykendall at The Sou’wester
Veteran songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Coykendall has been amazingly prolific over the last three decades or so. Currently most well known for his duties as a sideman, producer, and recordist via his work with M Ward, Blitzen Trapper, She & Him, Annalisa Tornfelt, & Tin Hat Trio, to name a few, Coykendall has been making his own unique outsider records since the mid ’80s.
Coykendall (pronounced “Kirk-in-doll) was raised near the dead center of the contiguous 48 states of America in rural Norwich, Kansas. In early high school he began playing drums and guitar and went on to perform in mid-western regional cover bands during the early 80’s. In the mid 80’s he started writing and recording his own songs on cassette 4-track and soon formed Wichita, Kansas based prarie-psych popsters Klyde Konnor. Klyde was a prolific and daring band that self-released approximately nine cassette albums between ’86 and ’91.
In ’91, he moved to San Francisco where he and wife Jill formed The Old Joe Clarks. The Old Joes worked hard and made three nuanced, highly acclaimed Americana-esque records. 1996’s Town of Ten, 1999’s Metal Shed Blues, & 2003’s November.
In ’99 after relocating to Portland, Oregon, Coykendall was able to expand his home studio and begin working other artists. One of those artists was M Ward. Their first collaboration was Ward’s 2003 masterpiece Transfiguration of Vincent. Soon after, Coykendall became a member of Ward’s touring band (also with She & Him).
In 2012 Coykendall released his third solo record titled Chasing Away the Dots via Portland’s Fluff & Gravy Records. Dots is a widely varied, moody yet playful record with a lived-in feel and is the perfect vehicle for Coykendall’s unfurnished vocals. This tidy little diamond in the rough also contained guest appearances by some of Coykendall’s musical friends including M Ward, Zooey Deschanel, Eric Earley, & Ben Gibbard.
Translating Dots to a live setting was an undertaking, as the record itself was filled with guest performances and layers of studio psychedelia. Coykendall met that challenge by essentially turning the record inside-out and stripping it down to it’s basic elements. He took to rocking these songs out with an oversized Kay electric guitar while stomping a tin can kick drum and swishing away on a huge set of high-hat cymbals. He began calling it the “rig”, and it stuck. These spontaneous performances are often a thick mix of Coykendall’s own compositions and reinterpretations of other writer’s famous or not-so-famous gems. Not working from a set list and seemingly testing each situation to see what boundaries can be pushed.
In late 2015 Coykendall released Half Past, Present Pending, partnering again with Fluff & Gravy Records. On this record, Coykendall takes the listener closer to the live “rig” performances by mixing excellent new compositions (check out “Hard Landing”) with compositions from his back catalogue (check out “East of Cheney” or “Spacebaker Blues”) in with fresh interpretations of other writers songs (he covers Roger Miller, Syd Barrett, etc) to great effect.
He continues to write, perform, produce, engineer, and wander SE Portland.
** Currently, this is scheduled not as a public event, but a live stream from the outdoor stage at The Sou’wester (weather permitting). If you are a guest staying with us, the show may be audible. *
(Live Stream) Paleo + Lucas Benoit at The Sou’wester
Paleo, aka David Strackany, is an American singer of folk music who is notable for writing a song every day for 365 days using a “half-size children’s guitar” while living out of his car and being essentially homeless.[3] He plays acoustic guitar and sings and in 2005 began touring the United States. He has a recording arrangement with an indie music label named Partisan Records.
Lucas Benoit: Born in McMinnville to an extended family of blue-collar musicians, Lucas Benoit is an inveterate song-maker and a founding member of the NW folk-rock favorites, The Hill Dogs.
Troubadour to the life sick, sidewalk prince of an invisible garden. Peter Pan meets Bob Dylan, they split a Mountain Dew. Donnie falls for Tina and it’s happily hardly after. Artful Dodger, a Midwest wanderer, stealing moments from a day, Lucas’s sing along choruses, jangling melodies and lyrics are junk drawers of metaphor and sweet treasures from the pockets of careless lovers. Tokens of wisdom scratched onto napkins by old friends. Lucas is at home with his arms wrapped round an old wood guitar and with paint and engine oil under his nails. His crooked smile and honest voice are doors and windows to the world.
** Currently, this is scheduled not as a public event, but a live stream from the outdoor stage at The Sou’wester (weather permitting). If you are a guest staying with us, the show may be audible. *