Pure feeling

Damry Ouk is an award-winning writer of Inupiat, Inuit descent from Anchorage, Alaska. Courtesy photo

via CAAI News Media

Writers from Taos and Alaska featured in SOMOS series finale

By Tara Somerville

Thursday, February 25, 2010 8:04 AM MST

Two poets take to the podium this week for the finale of the SOMOS Winter Writer’s Series. One of the writers is named “Damry Ouk.” She is an award-winning writer of Inupiat-Inuit descent, originally from Anchorage, Alaska, now residing in Santa Fe. She will read from “For-the-Spirits-Who-Are-Coming-Around-The-Bend.” And, Catherine Strisik, a Taos writer for 27 years, will read from her book, “Thousand Cricket Song,” which was just published Feb. 8. The readings are planned Friday (Feb. 26), 7 p.m., at Caffé Tazza, 122 Kit Carson Road.

Strisik’s book was inspired by a two-week visit she took to Cambodia five years ago. She and her daughter accompanied her husband to a reunion with Ouk Damry, a refugee he befriended while doing humanitarian work as a physician in Cambodia in 1980. From 1975-79, the country had suffered immeasurably under the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, who imposed an era of carnage from which the nation is still recovering.

Damry, who is now one of the vice presidents of the Cambodian Red Cross, gave Strisik’s family unusually rich and deep glimpses of the country in a short time.

“The stimulation was over the top — the food, the people, the sounds and smells ... Orphans were singing on every street corner, and in front of all the temples ... Everywhere there were roadside altars with flowers and talismans and incense burning,” Strisik says.

During her undergraduate studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Damry Ouk received the Truman Capote Scholarship and a fellowship to the Centrum-Port Townsend Writer’s Conference. She earned a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Stonecoast College at University of Southern Maine in January 2010.

“The Inuit words and the English words are always seeking embodiment which is crucial to the journey as I free them to do their unique work,” Damry Ouk says.

Tickets to the readings are $8; $6 for SOMOS members and seniors. High school students are welcome free of charge. For more information call (575) 758-0081 or visit http://www.somostaos.org/.