Creating a compelling world in few words is the challenge for all writers. Visiting Alaskan authors Peggy Shumaker and Eva Saulitis will demonstrate their mastery of this craft in a reading and a workshop at Volcano Art Center this weekend.

Shumaker's memoir, "Just Breathe Normally" (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), opens with a catastrophic wreck that fractures both the writer's skull and her perceptions. As memory bubbles up, Shumaker travels the route to compassion through the power of language.

Saulitis' essay collection, "Leaving Resurrection" (Red Hen Press, 2008), a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize, is written from the perspective of a biologist who seeks to understand animals, the natural world, and people who live close to both. Her essays take readers along on boats to get close to killer whales, on skis to find wolves, to islands to find strange and surprising people, in mukluks, in bare feet, in rubber boots, navigating inner and outer terrains.

In addition to the reading, the authors will host "In Short" a workshop which explores prose under two pages long.

"There is a big boom right now in short prose forms: sudden or flash fiction, prose poems, and short nonfiction," says Shumaker. The two-day workshop explores prose works in all three genres.

Participants are invited to read works by contemporary writers, such as brief narratives, lyric riffs in prose poems, and tiny memoirs, and then write some of their own. All writers are welcome (previous experience is valuable but not required).

About the authors: Shumaker's latest book of poetry is "Blaze," sensual Alaskan paintings and poems in collaboration with artist Kesler Woodward. She is a professor emerita of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies throughout the United States and in Australia, England, Canada, Japan and Russia.

Saulitis holds an MFA in creative writing and an MS in marine biology from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. She teaches writing in Homer at the Kachemak Bay campus of the University of Alaska and studies the killer whales of Alaska's gulf coast. Her poems and essays have appeared in various anthologies, including Homeground, edited by Barry Lopez, and numerous literary journals, such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West and others.