Mountain Writers Series

Archived Workshops

John Brehm

The Art of Losing: A Poetry Workshop via Zoom

Whether it’s the death of a parent, a spouse, a friend, a pet, or a relationship, we are faced with loss again and again in our lives. And now with the pandemic and the climate crisis bearing down on us, we are increasingly aware of just how vulnerable we are as individuals, as a country, and as a species. In this six-week online poetry workshop, we’ll explore the art of losing, how we can work with loss in the healing space of a poem to find comfort and consolation, perhaps even redemption and a renewed sense of aliveness in the aftermath of grief. We’ll read and discuss poems by W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Jack Gilbert, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins, Amy Gerstler, Claudia Emerson, and many others. Some portion of every session will be devoted to the poems you’ll write in response to our readings and weekly prompts. Our text will be The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, edited by Kevin Young.

• Meets: Fridays, 10:30 AM - 1:00 PM PST, September 18 - October 22
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, Maximum 12.
• Location: ZOOM -

John Brehm is the author of three books of poetry: Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, and No Day at the Beach, all from the University of Wisconsin Press. He is the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Plume, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, The Writer's Almanac, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland.

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Gary Miranda

Following a River: Writing & Conference via Facetime or Zoom

                         Freedom is not following a river.
                         Freedom is following a river
                         though, if you want to.

                                             -- William Stafford

These tutoring sessions are intended to help serious poets improve their poems and writing skills through consultation and revision. While individual poems will receive careful attention and thorough feedback, the emphasis will be on finding the poet's overall strengths and weaknesses in an effort to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Gary Miranda likes to think of this in terms of a river: "Some poets need more current, others need more banks." "Banks," he notes, "are a lot easier to learn." 

Students will submit their poems to Mr. Miranda in the week preceding their appointment. Hence, the fee includes tutor preparation to read and annotate the poems, and the individual conference session (an hour) to discuss and suggest directions. These one-on-one writing & conference sessions will be held by appointment, via Facetime or Zoom.

• Meets: Facetime or Zoom Sessions by Appointment
• Cost:  $385 for 4 individual sessions or $100 per session
• Enrollment: Individual writing-and-conference sessions

Register securely online through Paypal at www.mountainwriters.org or send check payable Mountain Writers to 2804 SE 27th, #2, Portland, OR 97202.

Online registration: fill in amount on PayPal website, indicating in "Add special instructions . . . " your enrollment preference: instructor, number of sessions, etc.

Gary Miranda has taught writing and literature at various colleges and universities, including three years as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Athens in Greece and, as writer-in-residence at Reed College in Portland. His poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and widely anthologized. He has published four collections, one of which, Listeners at the Breathing Place, won the Princeton Contemporary Poetry competition and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has also published a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. His awards include an NEA Fellowship, nine awards from the Poetry Society of America, and an invitation by The Atlantic Monthly to serve as poet-in-residence at the Robert Frost Place in New Hampshire. His poems have been taped for Harvard University’s Lamont Poetry Collection and the Library of Congress Poetry Archive. He lives in Portland.

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Tim Schell -  The Short Story: What is at Stake for Whom?

POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE - BECAUSE OF COVID

In this six-week workshop, Tim Schell will lead the group with several prompts that will take the writer from the seed of a story—an idea, an experience, and/or someone else’s experience—to a story’s fruition as we work to enhance the story’s arc.  Along the journey, students will work on drafts of their stories with individual workshops focusing on the various elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, point of view, dialogue, voice, style and tone—as they are addressed in the student work.   This will be a collaborative workshop wherein students will read their peers’ work before coming to the workshop prepared to discuss the work.  Class exercises will be focused on student stories.   Warning:  Character is › than plot.

• Meets: Mondays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, March 9 - April 13, 2020
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.

Tim Schell’s novel Road to the Sea was published by Serving House Books in October 2016.  He is the winner of the 2004 Mammoth Book Award for Prose for his novel The Drums of Africa which was published in the fall of 2007. In 2010, Tim’s novel The Memoir of Jake Weedsong was The Finalist in the AWP novel competition, and in 2011 it was published by Serving House Books. Tim is the co-author of Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Fiction and Poetry (Prentice Hall, 2^nd edition, 2006) and the co-editor of the anthology A Writer’s Country (Prentice Hall, 2001).  With Jeff Knorr, Tim co-founded the Clackamas Literary Review, and prior to that he served as Fiction Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review.  In 2018, Tim retired as the Chair of the Writing, Literature and Foreign Language Department at Columbia Gorge Community College in Hood River, Oregon.  He is currently at work on a new novel.

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Kirsten Rian - Hybrid Poetry

POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (BECAUSE OF COVID)

From Anne Carson to Dean Young to Rae Armantrout, we’ll study writers who conceptually and stylistically blur format and content lines, studying examples of their work and other prompts as launches for our own writing and experimenting in this bendable genre. Workshops will be part discussion and reading through and studying examples, as well as sharing and workshopping each other’s poem drafts.

•  · Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Thursday,  February 13 - March 12, 2020
• · Cost: $250 (Five 3-hour sessions)
• · Location:  Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 
• · Minimum 4; maximum 15 participants

Kirsten Rian’s newest book, Life Expectancy, was released in 2018 as part of the Pacific Northwest Writers Series through Redbat Books. Her anthology of Sierra Leonean poets and their accounts of the civil war, Kalashnikov in the Sun (Pika Press), is in every classroom in Sierra Leone. She teaches at Portland State University and was the poetry editor and a book reviewer at The Oregonian for five years. She has been awarded artist fellowships, grants, and international residencies from the Oregon Arts Commission, RACC, and elsewhere, leading creative writing workshops throughout the Northwest and in northern Iceland, post-war Sierra Leone and refugee relocation centers in Finland, using creative writing as a tool for literacy, community, and peacebuilding. She has maintained a concurrent career as a fine art and photography curator and has coordinated over 350 exhibitions, and picture edited or written essays for over 80 books and catalogues.

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Leanne Grabel - Graphic Flash Memoir/Illustrated Prose Poetry

POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (BECAUSE OF COVID)

In this workshop, students will write short lyrical memoirs or illustrated prose poems. The challenge will be to capture the poignancy and details of each significant memory in the least words possible so that the story can be told in one lucid, yet highly visual and beautifully written page. Conciseness and clarity will rule in this workshop. This workshops will explore ways to enter a memoir, edit a memoir, and choose the not-so-obvious-but-much-easier-to-draw details to illustrate and share ways to avoid being intimidated by drawing (for non-artists). 

• Meets: Wednesdays, 6 - 9 PM, January 8 - February 12, 2020
• Cost: $250 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 8

Leanne Grabel, M.Ed., is a writer, illustrator, performer and special education & language arts teacher. In love with mixing genres and media, Grabel has written and produced numerous spoken-word multi-media shows, including “The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression”; “Anger: The Musical”; and “The Little Poet.” Her poetry books include Flirtations; Lonesome & Very Quarrelsome Heroes; Short Poems by a Short Person; Badgirls (a collection of flash non-fiction, as well as a theater piece); and Gold Shoes: Graphic Prose Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Grabel taught Language Arts as a special education teacher in a residential treatment center for a dozen years. She and her husband Steve Sander are the founders of Café Lena, Portland’s legendary poetry café of the 90s. Currently, Grabel is teaching graphic flash memoir to adults in several arts centers and retirement communities throughout the Pacific Northwest, most recently Menucha and Rose Villa.

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Leanne Grabel - Graphic Flash Memoir/Illustrated Prose Poetry

In this workshop, students will write short lyrical memoirs or illustrated prose poems from which one detail will be pulled out and illustrated. Colors, textures, smells, sounds -- the vast spectrum of imagery--will provide the inspiration. The challenge will be to capture the poignancy and details of each significant memory in the least words possible so that the story can be told in one lucid, yet highly visual and beautifully written page. Conciseness and clarity will rule in this workshop. Inspired by Maira Kalman, Alison Bechdel, Ellen Forney, Nicole George and Sandra Cisneros, this workshops will explore ways to enter a memoir, edit a memoir, and choose the not-so-obvious-but-much-easier-to-draw details to illustrate. We will share ways to avoid being intimidated by drawing (for non-artists), and we will experiment with weaving voices together and incorporating images on a screen, using a keyboard beat. The workshop will conclude with a reading/performance.

• Meets: Wednesdays, 1- 4:00 PM, April 1 - 29, 2020
• Cost: $250 (Five three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 8
• Location: Room 12, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Leanne Grabel, M.Ed., is a writer, illustrator, performer and special education & language arts teacher. In love with mixing genres and media, Grabel has written and produced numerous spoken-word multi-media shows, among them, The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression” and “Anger: The Musical.” Her poetry books include Flirtations; Lonesome & Very Quarrelsome Heroes; Short Poems by a Short Person; Badgirls (a collection of flash non-fiction, as well as a theater piece); and Gold Shoes: Graphic Prose Poems (2018). Grabel taught Language Arts as a special education teacher in a residential treatment center for a dozen years. She and her husband Steve Sander are the founders of Café Lena, Portland’s legendary poetry café of the 90s. Grabel will be the recipient of the 2020 Bread and Roses Award from Soapstone for contributions to women’s literature. ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE. will be publishing Grabel’s illustrated flash memoir monthly for the next year.

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Lex Runciman - Poetry Revision Workshop

POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE - BECAUSE OF COVID

This poetry revision workshop assumes that to begin writing a poem is to initiate a unique process of curiosity and discovery, and that to complete a poem is to end that particular process. Thus, our workshop aim will be not to fix a draft or finish a poem -- though those things could happen. Rather our aim will be to intuit and explore the draft's materials, to understand its intentions (first without the writer's comment), and to identify and experiment with possible fruitful revision. Our aim will be to deepen the writer's sense of possibility for that poem and become more aware of revision possibilities for other poems as well. Participants will distribute drafts to be discussed the following session. No beginners. No prompts.

• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 9.

Lex Runciman holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah and an M.F.A from the University of Montana, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees and Richard Hugo. He has authored six books of poems, including Salt Moons: Poems 1981-2016 from Salmon Poetry (Ireland) and The Admirations (Lynx House Press), which won the Oregon Book Award in 1989. Winner of the Silcox Prize and the Kenneth O. Hanson Award, his poems have been featured on Verse Daily and reprinted in several notable anthologies, including Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and From Here We Speak, the poetry volume of the landmark Oregon Literature Series published by Oregon State University Press in 1994. In a 25-year career at Linfield College, he won the Olds-Hellie Award for Creative Achievement in 2014 and was twice named the Edith Green Distinguished Professor. He lives now in Portland, Oregon.

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Kirsten Rian

Eco Writing - Writing the land

POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (BECAUSE OF COVID)

The land holds stories. All the Earth’s memories and our footsteps, that while washed away or covered up with new growth, or pavement, or crops, are still there underneath it all. We’ll read through inspired and inspiring work from Barry Lopez to Wendell Berry to Robert Macfarlane, Robert Michael Pyle, Rachel Carson, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, and others, and explore our own nonfiction writing in this rich and moving subject area. Workshops will be part discussion of examples, as well as sharing and workshopping each other’s drafts. 

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Monday, May 4 - June 8, 2020 (no class May 25, Memorial Day)
• Cost: $250 (Five 3-hour sessions)
• Minimum 4; maximum 15 participants

Kirsten Rian’s newest book, Life Expectancy, was released in 2018 as part of the Pacific Northwest Writers Series through Redbat Books. Her anthology of Sierra Leonean poets and their accounts of the civil war, Kalashnikov in the Sun (Pika Press), is in every classroom in Sierra Leone. She teaches at Portland State University and was the poetry editor and a book reviewer at The Oregonian for five years. She has been awarded artist fellowships, grants, and international residencies from the Oregon Arts Commission, RACC, and elsewhere, leading creative writing workshops throughout the Northwest and in northern Iceland, post-war Sierra Leone and refugee relocation centers in Finland, using creative writing as a tool for literacy, community, and peacebuilding. She has maintained a concurrent career as a fine art and photography curator and has coordinated over 350 exhibitions, and picture edited or written essays for over 80 books and catalogues.

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Following a River: Writing & Conference with Gary Miranda

                         Freedom is not following a river.
                         Freedom is following a river
                         though, if you want to.

                                             -- William Stafford

These tutoring sessions are intended to help serious poets improve their poems and writing skills through consultation and revision. While individual poems will receive careful attention and thorough feedback, the emphasis will be on finding the poet's overall strengths and weaknesses in an effort to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Gary Miranda likes to think of this in terms of a river: "Some poets need more current, others need more banks." "Banks," he notes, "are a lot easier to learn." 

Students will submit their poems to Mr. Miranda in the week preceding their appointment. Hence, the fee includes tutor preparation to read and annotate the poems, and the individual conference session (an hour) to discuss and suggest directions. These one-on-one writing & conference sessions, by appointment, will be held Wednesdays at the TaborSpace Cafe. Request for other days/hours will be considered on an individual basis.

• Meets: By appointment, VIA ZOOM.
• Cost:  $385 for 4 individual sessions or $100 per session
• Enrollment: Individual writing-and-conference sessions, by appointment.

Gary Miranda has taught writing and literature at various colleges and universities, including three years as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Athens in Greece and, as writer-in-residence at Reed College in Portland. His poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and widely anthologized. He has published four collections, one of which, Listeners at the Breathing Place, won the Princeton Contemporary Poetry competition and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has also published a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. His awards include an NEA Fellowship, nine awards from the Poetry Society of America, and an invitation by The Atlantic Monthly to serve as poet-in-residence at the Robert Frost Place in New Hampshire. His poems have been taped for Harvard University’s Lamont Poetry Collection and the Library of Congress Poetry Archive. He lives in Portland.

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Tim Schell - The Short Story: What is at Stake for Whom?

In this six-week workshop, Tim Schell will lead the group with several prompts that will take the writer from the seed of a story—an idea, an experience, and/or someone else’s experience—to a story’s fruition as we work to enhance the story’s arc.  Along the journey, students will work on drafts of their stories with individual workshops focusing on the various elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, point of view, dialogue, voice, style and tone—as they are addressed in the student work.   This will be a collaborative workshop wherein students will read their peers’ work before coming to the workshop prepared to discuss the work.  Class exercises will be focused on student stories.   Warning:  Character is greater than Plot.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, January 9 - February 13, 2020
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)

Tim Schell’s novel Road to the Sea was published by Serving House Books in October 2016.  He is the winner of the 2004 Mammoth Book Award for Prose for his novel The Drums of Africa which was published in the fall of 2007. In 2010, Tim’s novel The Memoir of Jake Weedsong was The Finalist in the AWP novel competition, and in 2011 it was published by Serving House Books. Tim is the co-author of Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Fiction and Poetry (Prentice Hall, 2^nd edition, 2006) and the co-editor of the anthology A Writer’s Country (Prentice Hall, 2001).  With Jeff Knorr, Tim co-founded the Clackamas Literary Review, and prior to that he served as Fiction Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review.  In 2018, Tim retired as the Chair of the Writing, Literature and Foreign Language Department at Columbia Gorge Community College in Hood River, Oregon.  He is currently at work on a new novel.

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Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting is necessary (although it’s good if you’ve seen some plays and read a few). We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace as we write and workshop scenes. Playwriting is great practice for novelists and short story writers who want practice working with dialogue.

• Meets:Saturdays, 12 - 3 PM, January 11 - February 15, 2020
• Enrollment: Minimum 5; maximum 10
• Place: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR
• Cost: $240 [Six three-hour sessions.] Register at www.mountainwriters.org.
  
  

Gay Monteverde is the author of three plays. Harriet Tubman: An American Moses (a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education’s Best New Play Award) and The Arabian Nights (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award’s Angus Bowmer Award for Drama) both of which were published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City and have had multiple productions in locations as far ranging as Australia and Kentucky. Gay’s third play, a contemporary romantic comedy based on Pride and Prejudice and set in Portland, had its world premiere in the Berkshires in February. She has taught writing at Portland Community College and Mt. Hood Community College for many years.

Annie Lighthart

Dickinson and Whitman for Writers

Come write, read, and sit at the table with two remarkable poetry guides: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Instead of seeing these poets as untouchable literary ancestors, in this two-part workshop we’ll take a look at the very practical things we can learn from them as fellow writers who loved and struggled with this craft. Together we’ll read poems by each author (Whitman the first session, Dickinson the second) and try a variety of writing exercises suggested by their work and ideas. We’ll see, for example, what happens when we bring Dickinson’s famous dashes into our own poems or when we stretch out into Whitman’s long lines. If you’ve been wary of either poet, or simply curious about them, this is a great way to make discoveries about their writing, as well as your own.  All levels of writing experience welcome.

• Meets: Saturday, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, November 16 & 23, 2019
• Cost: $100 (Two three-hour Saturday sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12

Annie Lighthart is a poet and teacher who started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. She has taught at Boston College and with writers of all ages.  Poems from her books Iron String and Lantern have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and in various anthologies, including Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems and Healing the Divide. Pax, her next book of poetry, will be out in 2020 from Salmon Poetry. Annie’s poems have been turned into choral music, used in healing projects in Ireland, England, and New Zealand, and have traveled farther than she has.

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Lex Runciman

Poetry Revision Workshop

This poetry revision workshop assumes that to begin writing a poem is to initiate a unique process of curiosity and discovery, and that to complete a poem is to end that particular process. Thus, our workshop aim will be not to fix a draft or finish a poem -- though those things could happen. Rather our aim will be to intuit and explore the draft's materials, to understand its intentions (first without the writer's comment), and to identify and experiment with possible fruitful revision. Our aim will be to deepen the writer's sense of possibility for that poem and become more aware of revision possibilities for other poems as well. Participants will distribute drafts to be discussed the following session. No beginners. No prompts.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, September 19 - October 24, 2019
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 9.

Lex Runciman holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah and an M.F.A from the University of Montana, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees and Richard Hugo. He has authored six books of poems, including Salt Moons: Poems 1981-2016 from Salmon Poetry (Ireland) and The Admirations (Lynx House Press), which won the Oregon Book Award in 1989. Winner of the Silcox Prize and the Kenneth O. Hanson Award, his poems have been featured on Verse Daily and reprinted in several notable anthologies, including Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and From Here We Speak, the poetry volume of the landmark Oregon Literature Series published by Oregon State University Press in 1994. In a 25-year career at Linfield College, he won the Olds-Hellie Award for Creative Achievement in 2014 and was twice named the Edith Green Distinguished Professor. He lives now in Portland, Oregon.

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John Brehm

Reading as a Writer: A.R. Ammons

In this six-week workshop, we'll take a deep dive into the work of A.R. Ammons, one of America's most inventive and prolific poets. From short poems to book-length poems and everything in between, Ammons engages the human predicament with a rare mixture of irreverent humor and philosophical depth. We'll pay speciall attention to the influence of Taoist thought on Ammons' poetics. But our main concern will be with how the poems are made and how they might open new possibilities for our own work. Two of our six sessions will be devoted to participatnt poems. Our texts will be The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons, The Selected Poems, and Garbage.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, October 29 to December 3, 2019.
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, Maximum 12.

John Brehm is the author of three books of poetry: Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, and No Day at the Beach (forthcoming in 2020), all from the University of Wisconsin Press. He is the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Plume, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, The Writer's Almanac, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland.

Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting is necessary (although it’s good if you’ve seen some plays and read a few). We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace as we write and workshop scenes. Playwriting is great practice for novelists and short story writers who want practice working with dialogue.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Wednesdays, May 8 - June 12, 2019 [No workshop May 22]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Cost: $240 [Five three-hour sessions.]
  
  

Gay Monteverde is the author of three plays: Harriet Tubman: An American Moses (a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education’s Best New Play Award) and The Arabian Nights (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award’s Angus Bowmer Award for Drama) are published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City and have had multiple productions in locations as far ranging as Australia and Kentucky. Gay’s third play, a contemporary romantic comedy based on Pride and Prejudice and set in Portland, had its world premiere in the Berkshires in February. She has taught writing at Portland Community College and Mt. Hood Community College for many years.

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Gina Ochsner

Fiction Writing Workshop: Creating Compelling Characters, Fueling Narrative Conflict, and Finding Your Voice

This five-week course will focus on both craft and process.  In the first three sessions we will divide our time between idea generation/new material development and examinations of how elements like character, setting, imagery, scene and dialogue can not only shape but push stories (or novel chapters) forward. The last session will be primarily devoted to critiquing/providing commentary on the works generated by participants. This class is designed for writers of any experience level. My only assumption I will make about you, your work, or your writerly interests is that you are curious about writing and want to learn more.  

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:30 PM, May 9 - June 6, 2019
• Cost:  $210 (Five-week workshop)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 10.

Gina Ochsner is the author of two novels: The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (2009) and The Hidden Letters of Velta B (2016). She has also published two short story collections: The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and People I Wanted To Be. Both collections were awarded the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. Ochsner has been awarded a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts. Gina Ochsner lives in the mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon and teaches writing and literature at Corban University and with Seattle Pacific’s Low Residency MFA program.

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Lex Runciman

Poetry Revision Workshop

This poetry revision workshop assumes that to begin writing a poem is to initiate a unique process of curiosity and discovery, and that to complete a poem is to end that particular process.  Thus, our workshop aim will be not to fix a draft or finish a poem – though those things could happen. Rather our aim will be to intuit and explore the draft's materials, to understand its intentions (first without the writer's comment), and to identify and experiment with possible fruitful revision.  Our aim will be to deepen the writer's sense of possibility for that poem and become more aware of revision possibilities for other poems as well. Participants will distribute drafts to be discussed the following session. No beginners. No prompts.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, May 9- June 13, 2019
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 9.

Lex Runciman holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah and an M.F.A from the University of Montana, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees and Richard Hugo. He has authored six books of poems, including Salt Moons: Poems 1981-2016 from Salmon Poetry (Ireland) and The Admirations (Lynx House Press), which won the Oregon Book Award in 1989. Winner of the Silcox Prize and the Kenneth O. Hanson Award, his poems have been featured on Verse Daily and reprinted in several notable anthologies, including Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and From Here We Speak, the poetry volume of the landmark Oregon Literature Series published by Oregon State University Press in 1994. In a 25-year career at Linfield College, he won the Olds-Hellie Award for Creative Achievement in 2014 and was twice named the Edith Green Distinguished Professor. He lives now in Portland, Oregon.

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John Brehm 

The Empathic Imagination

Great poems can both express and elicit a profound sense of empathy. They invite us to feel into the suffering of others -- and into our own suffering -- and to respond with compassion. In this six-week workshop, we'll explore the role of the empathic imagination in poems by Walt Whitman, Kobayashi Issa, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ron Padgett, Ellen Bass, Jill McDonough, and others. Weekly prompts will suggest ways to work with empathy and compassion in our own writing.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, Tuesdays, Feb.26 through April 9 except April 2, 2019.
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.

John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith and Help Is on the Way, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm is the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (OUP, 2006), and the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy (Wisdom, 2017).  His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999 & 2017, and many other journals and anthologies. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. 

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Gina Ochsner

Fiction Writing Workshop

Fiction Intensive:

Creating Compelling Characters, Fueling Narrative Conflict, and Finding Your Voice

This five-week course will focus on both craft and process.  In the first  three sessions we will divide our time between idea generation/new material development and examinations of  how elements like character, setting, imagery, scene and dialogue can not only shape but push stories (or novel chapters) forward.  The last session will be primarily devoted to critiquing/providing commentary on the works generated by participants.  This class is designed for writers of any experience level.  My only assumption I will make about you, your work, or your writerly interests is that you are curious about writing and want to learn more.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:30 PM, September 27 - November 25, 2018
• Cost:  $250 (Five-week workshop)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Gina Ochsner is the author of two novels: The Russion Dreambook of Colour and Flight (2009) and The Hidden Letters of Velta B (2016). She has also published two short story collections: The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and People I Wanted To Be. Both collections were awarded the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. Ochsner has been awarded a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts. Gina Ochsner lives in the mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon and teaches writing and literature at Corban University and with Seattle Pacific’s Low Residency MFA program.

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Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage. This is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional, or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting necessary (although it's good if you've seen some plays). We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace, as we write and workshop scenes and scripts.

• Meets: By appointment
• Cost:  $290 for 4 individual sessions or $75 per session
• Location: TBA
• Enrollment: Individual writing-and-conference sessions, by appointment.

Register securely online through Paypal at www.mountainwriters.org or send check payable Mountain Writers to 2804 SE 27th, #2, Portland, OR 97202.

Online registration: fill in amount on PayPal website, indicating in "Add special instructions . . . " your enrollment preference: instructor, number of sessions, etc.

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Gay Monteverde is the author of two published plays: Harriet Tubman: An American Moses (a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education's Best New Play Award) and The Arabian Nights (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award's Angus Bowmer Award for Drama). Both plays premiered in Portland, are published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City, and have had productions in locations as far-ranging as Tasmania and Kentucky. Gay's third play, a contemporary comedy based on Pride and Prejudice, is looking for a theater company. Her fourth play is coming soon. Gay's third play was part of HART's recent Page to Stage showcase. She teaches writing at Portland Community College and Mt. Hood Community College. 

John Brehm

The Poetry of Praise

In this six-week workshop, we'll focus on reading and writing poems that draw on one of poetry's most enduring and life-giving impulses: to praise, to honor, to pay homage, to exalt. We'll use weekly prompts as well as examples fron Gerard Manly Hopkins, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hass, Denise Levertov, A.R. Ammons, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Ellen Bass and others, to cultivate the power of praise in our own work.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, Tuesdays, August 21 – September 25, 2018
• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith and Help Is on the Way, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm is the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (OUP, 2006), and the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy (Wisdom, 2017).  His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999 & 2017, and many other journals and anthologies. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. 

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Carl Adamshick

Poems as Modes of Expression

This workshop will focus on understanding poems as modes of expression. Pindar praised athletes in an outrageously hyperbolized manner, and his invention of the ode, simply understood as a poem of praise, is a form, a mode that poets still utilize. One just needs to think of Neruda. The class will write, not poems of formalized structure like sonnet, haiku, villanelle or pantoum, but poems with a mode and governing purpose like elegies, odes, aubades, blazons and epithalamiums. We will pick, choose and invent our own modes of expression and then ascribe different tones and feelings to each mode.

• Meets: Mondays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, October 1 - 22, 2018
• Cost:  $240 (Four three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Carl Adamshick is the author of Curses and Wishes, which won the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American Poets, and Saint Friend. His most recent book, Receipt, is a collaboration with Andy Buck is a sculptor and furniture designer who lives and works in upstate New York. Adamshick is a founder and editor at Tavern Books, a nonprofit press dedicated to poetry and the preservation of books. Twice a winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, he has received an Oregon Literary Felllowship and served as the William Stafford poet-in-residence at Lewis and Clark College. He lives and works in Portland.

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Gina Ochsner

Fiction Writing Workshop

Fiction Intensive:

Creating Compelling Characters, Fueling Narrative Conflict, and Finding Your Voice

This five-week course will focus on both craft and process.  In the first  three sessions we will divide our time between idea generation/new material development and examinations of  how elements like character, setting, imagery, scene and dialogue can not only shape but push stories (or novel chapters) forward.  The last session will be primarily devoted to critiquing/providing commentary on the works generated by participants.  This class is designed for writers of any experience level.  My only assumption I will make about you, your work, or your writerly interests is that you are curious about writing and want to learn more.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:30 PM, September 27 - November 25, 2018
• Cost:  $250 (Five-week workshop)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Gina Ochsner is the author of two novels: The Russion Dreambook of Colour and Flight (2009) and The Hidden Letters of Velta B (2016). She has also published two short story collections: The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and People I Wanted To Be. Both collections were awarded the Oregon Book Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. Ochsner has been awarded a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts. Gina Ochsner lives in the mid-Willamette Valley of Oregon and teaches writing and literature at Corban University and with Seattle Pacific’s Low Residency MFA program.

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Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage. This is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional, or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting necessary (although it's good if you've seen some plays). We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace, as we write and workshop scenes and scripts.

• Meets: By appointment
• Cost:  $290 for 4 individual sessions or $75 per session
• Location: TBA
• Enrollment: Individual writing-and-conference sessions, by appointment.

Register securely online through Paypal at www.mountainwriters.org or send check payable Mountain Writers to 2804 SE 27th, #2, Portland, OR 97202.

Online registration: fill in amount on PayPal website, indicating in "Add special instructions . . . " your enrollment preference: instructor, number of sessions, etc.

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Gay Monteverde is the author of two published plays: Harriet Tubman: An American Moses (a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education's Best New Play Award) and The Arabian Nights (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award's Angus Bowmer Award for Drama). Both plays premiered in Portland, are published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City, and have had productions in locations as far-ranging as Tasmania and Kentucky. Gay's third play, a contemporary comedy based on Pride and Prejudice, is looking for a theater company. Her fourth play is coming soon. Gay's third play was part of HART's recent Page to Stage showcase. She teaches writing at Portland Community College and Mt. Hood Community College. 

John Brehm

Voice in Poetry

A distinctive, compelling voice in a poem instantly commands our attention—it casts a spell over us and draws us in. And a voice that feels flat or overly familiar will fail to engage us, regardless of how interesting what it’s saying happens to be. In this six-week workshop, we’ll read a variety of strongly voiced poems by Denez Smith, Chrys Tobey, Ellen Bass, Robert Hass, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, Lucia Perillo, and others, and investigate how such poets create—through rhythm, volume, pitch, tone, attitude, etc.—unmistakable voices in their work. Weekly prompts will encourage participants to experiment with different aspects of voice in their own poems.  

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, February 20 - March 27, 2018

• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith and Help Is on the Way, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm is the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (OUP, 2006), and the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy (Wisdom, 2017).  His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999 & 2017, and many other journals and anthologies. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. 

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Judith Barrington

Prose from the Poet's Toolbox

What can we find in the poet's toolbox that will make our prose writing shine with images and sing with the sounds of the words? Whether we are writing memoir, creative nonfiction, or a piece of fiction, we can look beyond plot and character, dialogue and setting, to the language itself for the reading pleasure that need not be limitd to poems. Virginia Woolf said, "All writing isnothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm"; and William Carlos Williams said, "No ideas but in things." We'll look at prose example that echo these and other poetric principles. You may find yourself writing prose or poetry -- or wondering which is which.

• Meets: Saturday, February 24, March 10, March 24, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
• Location: Room 23/12/23:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Cost:  $285 for 3 sessions

Judith Barrington’s fifth collection of poetry, Long Love: New & Selected Poems will be launched on June 12th.  She is also the author of The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award. In 2001 Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Judith is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program. She has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain and is one of the founders of Soapstone Inc.

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John Brehm

Poetry & Poetics of Robert Frost

The pleasures of Frost’s poetry are inexhaustible, and the insights to be found in his essays and letters are invaluable. Far from the persona of the simple farmer-poet dispensing country wisdom that he himself promoted, Frost was a highly sophisticated artist and the most brilliant formalist of the 20th century. In this six-week course, we’ll read and discuss a broad selection of Frost’s poetry and prose, focusing on the many ways it can inform and deepen our own writing. Two of our six class sessions will be devoted to discussing participant poems inspired by or written in response to Frost’s work. Our text will be Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (Library of America).

• Meets: Wednesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, January 3 - February 7, 2018

• Cost:  $300 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith and Help Is on the Way, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm is the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (OUP, 2006), and the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy (Wisdom, 2017).  His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999 & 2017, and many other journals and anthologies. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. 

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Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage. This is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional, or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting necessary (although it's good if you've seen some plays). We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace, as we write and workshop scenes and scripts.

• Meets: Mondays, 6:30 - 9:30 PM, February 5 - March 12, 2018
• Location: Room 23/12/23:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Cost:  $290 for 6 sessions

Gay Monteverde is the author of two published plays: Harriet Tubman: An American Moses (a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education's Best New Play Award) and The Arabian Nights (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award's Angus Bowmer Award for Drama). Both plays premiered in Portland, are published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City, and have had productions in locations as far-ranging as Tasmania and Kentucky. Gay's third play, a contemporary comedy based on Pride and Prejudice, is looking for a theater company. Her fourth play is coming soon. Gay's third play was part of HART's recent Page to Stage showcase. She teaches writing at Portland Community College and Mt. Hood Community College.

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Sandra Scofield

"Aboutness" - A Workshop for Novelists and Narrative Memoirists

You can write a narrative all the way to the end and still not be able to say what it is about. Uh-oh. Learn how to capture the essence of a story in a few clear sentences. That analysis becomes a North Star for your character and plot development. It is your way into drafting or revising a story, and it's your way into convincing someone they really should read it.

In this session you will learn to:

• articulate the subject and idea of your story.
• make an umbrella statement of the action and its impact.
• describe the vision and the world of the story.
• say how your protagonist proves your concept of the story world.

Sessions include exercises to apply these concepts practically to your manuscript, whether it is in the dreaming stage, an outline, early pages, or a substantial draft. 

Required reading: The Last Draft: A Novelist's Guide to Revision

Recommended reading: The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer

• Date & Time: Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:30 P.M. February 8, 15, 22 & March 1, 2018
• Cost: $285 [Includes the cost of 4 sessions and The Last Draft: A Novelist’s Guide to Revision]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 15

Sandra Scofield is the author of seven novels, including a finalist for the National Book Award; two memoirs, Occasions of Sin and Mysteries of Love and Grief; two books on craft--recently The Last Draft: A Novelist's Guide to Revision--and recent fiction, Swim: Stories of the Sixties. She is on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program and the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She is also a painter.

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Christopher Howell - Finding the Poem in the Poem

In this three-part workshop we will examine how poems begin and end, how image and voice contrast and interact, and the role of narrative (actual or implied) in fostering the sense of a whole form. we will work our way through these topics in conjunction with an emphasis upon how to edit our drafts in terms of their points of energy, rather than in terms of the rhetorics of intension and relative magnitude, how to identify the images and resonances that make poems live, and how to approach this editing as an act of discovery and, essentially, of liberation--from the tyranny of what seems reasonable because it is familiar.

Students are welcome to select sessions for enrollment. Those who wish to take one or two sessions should contact Mountain Writers Series for discounts after enrollment.

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Christopher Howell - Finding the Poem in the Poem

• Session One: How Do We Begin and Where Do We End

In this workshop session, we will examine how poems begin and end. We will focus much of our discussion on two matters crucial to a poem’s total effect: how it opens (or may be opened) and how we determine that it has ended (or may be closed). Because these two movements (or moments) are common to all poetry and all levels, the class should be appropriate for both advanced and beginning writers. Students should come to class with ten copies of at least two of their own poems, plus one copy of a favorite poem that they feel demonstrates effective opening and closure. enty of writing prompts, we will find ways to encourage readers to be receptive to our work.

• Meets: Monday, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, September 25
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Cost:  $285 for 3 sessions; $185 for 2 sessions; $95 for 1 session
• Discounted prices for more than one workshop will be applied in the office after registration.

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Christopher Howell - Finding the Poem in the Poem

• Session Two: Image and Voice

Ezra Pound said that poetry is comprised of a variable and a constant. There are all kinds of ways of interpreting this binary assertion. In this workshop session, we will examine how Image and Voice contrast and interact – their differential, their interplay, their effect on a poem’s movement and structure. We will discuss student work in these terms. Please bring with you ten copies of at least two of your own poems, plus a poem you admire by someone else.

• Meets: Monday, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, October 30
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

• Cost:  $285 for 3 sessions; $185 for 2 sessions; $95 for 1 session
• Discounted prices for more than one workshop will be applied in the office after registration.

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Christopher Howell - Finding the Poem in the Poem

• Session Three: Narrative - The Ghostly Presence

In this intensive workshop session we will snub Aristotle by considering narrative not as a sequence of related events with a beginning, middle, and end, but as tonal, referential, imagistic, or thematic threads that contribute to our sense of a poem’s unitary result.  We will explore the ways in which “narrative” and “story” can be quite different modes of exploration, and how the poet may navigate between and around them.  Prompts and a reading list will be provided for further practice and study. Please provide ten copies of two of your own poems, plus one copy of a narrative poem you admire.

• Meets: Saturday, November 11, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Cost:  $285 for 3 sessions; $185 for 2 sessions; $95 for 1 session
• Discounted prices for more than one workshop will be applied in the office after registration.

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Christopher Howell is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently, Love’s Last Number: Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Among his many other books of poetry are Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His work has been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award. A military journalist during the Vietnam War, since 1974 he has been the director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and is now also director for Willow Springs Books. He lives in Spokane, where is on the Master of Fine Arts faculty of Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers.

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Annie Lighthart

Neruda for Writers: A Poetry Workshop

Saturday, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, September 23 , 2017

Come and explore the work and life of Pablo Neruda -- poet of the secret life of objects, poet of the people, poet who loved to write with green ink.  In this workshop we’ll read a range of Neruda poems and try a variety of exercises inspired by this poet who declared, “Poetry is an act of peace.  Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”  Neruda also said that writing is like breathing.  Together we’ll take a deep breath and a close look at this generous and prolific poet.

• Meets: Saturday, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, September 23, 2017
• Cost: $95 (One four-hour Saturday session)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Annie Lighthart started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. Since those first strange days, she published her poetry collection Iron String with Oregon’s Airlie Press. Her poetry has been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye to be placed in Ireland’s Galway University Hospitals as part of their Poems for Patience project.  Annie has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with students of all ages. She currently lives in a small green corner of Portland, Oregon.

Link to Workshop Flyer

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John Brehm

The Long and the Short of It: A Workshop on the Free Verse Line

Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, November 2 to December 14 (no class Thanksgiving)

How does line length affect our temporal experience of a poem? What rhythmic effects are created by radially shortened lines or expansively long ones? In the absence of abstract metrical forms, how do we decide on line length and line breaks? How does white space affect our engagement with a poem’s language? These are some of the questions we’ll explore in this six-week poetry workshop. We’ll look at a wide range of examples and use weekly prompts to experiment with varied line lengths in our poems.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, November 2 - December 14 (no class Thanksgiving)
• Cost:  $300 (Four three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives with his wife in Portland.

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Alicia Jo Rabins

Poetry as Spiritual Autobiography: A Workshop

Since poetry lives beyond the rational, it is an ideal container for spiritual autobiographies: stories of seeking, growth, revelation, and even disappointment. In this workshop, we will encounter poems from diverse spiritual and religious traditions including Joy Harjo, Yehuda Amichai, Kazim Ali, Christopher Smart, and others. We will consider how poetic craft can help convey the most ineffable of human experiences. We’ll also experiment with topics for your own poetic spiritual autobiographies, a great opportunity to play with a new form of poetry, and to consider your own stories in a new light.

• Meets: 6:00 -9:00 PM, Monday, September 11, 2017
• Cost:  $95 (One three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet, composer, performer and Torah scholar. Her poetry book, Divinity School, was selected by C.D. Wright for the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and published by American Poetry Review in September. As a musician, Alicia tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women, with whom she has released three albums. "A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff," her one-woman chamber-rock opera about the intersection of spirituality and finance, was named one of Portland's five best theatre performances of 2014 by the Willamette Week. She played bluegrass fiddle across Central America and Kuwait as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department, and toured for eight years as the violinist in Brooklyn-based klezmer-punk band, Golem. Alicia lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and their two small children.

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Chrys Tobey

Turn Toward Me: Writing Social Commentary in Poetry

If writing is reciprocal, if other humans will read our work, how do we write social commentary in poetry that is not didactic, that does not turn off the reader?  This generative writing workshop will explore the creative ways we can make readers turn toward our poems, our social commentary, our arguments. We will look at poems by Denise Duhamel, Matthea Harvey, Terrance Hayes, Charles Harper Webb, among others, for examples. Through readings and plenty of writing prompts, we will find ways to encourage readers to be receptive to our work.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, August 24, August 31, September 14 & September 21
• Note: No class September 7
• Cost:  $200 (Four three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Chrys Tobey’s first poetry book, A Woman is a Woman is a Woman is a Woman, was published by Steel Toe Books in January 2017, and she has just completed a tour that included readings in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle, as well as in Portland. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Smartish Pace and the minnesota review. With her sister, the poet Allison Tobey, Chrys curates the reading series, Women Writers Against Trump, in Southeast Portland. She currently lives and teaches in Portland, Oregon

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Matthew Minicucci

Lessons in the Echo: Mythology and Craft

How does mythology help us consider difficult subjects—subjects that seem to have no course but cliche? Consider a poem from Charles Simic about the ferryman, Charon, gathering more bodies by the shore. Or Louise Gluck writing about Penelope, Odysseus, and the events of the Odyssey as she addresses the dissolution of her own marriage. The most difficult subjects often push us to ancient stories or other myths as anchors. In the first two weeks, we’ll examine mythology as considered by accomplished contemporary poets -- among them Anne Carson, Kathleen Graber, and Carl Phillips. The remaining class sessions will be dedicated to working on poems by workshop participants, as we consider approaches to our own difficult subjects.

The remaining class sessions will be dedicated to working on poems by the workshop participants, considering the craft of our own difficult subjects, and how mythology can function as a frame for these pieces that seem to stick in our heads, but need a push to make it to the page.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, March 21 - April 18, 2017
• Cost:  $240 (Five three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Matthew Minicucci is the author of two collections of poetry: Translation (Kent State University Press, 2015), chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Wick Poetry Prize, and Small Gods, forthcoming from New Issues Press in 2017. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Wick Poetry Center, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also received his MFA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2014, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review, among others.

Read Minicucci's award-winning poem, "A Whale's Heart"

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Christopher Howell

Loosening Up: A Workshop

A poet’s impulse to write is often connected to troubling situations, memories, relationships, longings. In consequence there is often, in composition, a fierce drive against the weight driving the creative impulse. Sometimes this keeps us honest and on task; often it promotes a kind of rigidity and reliance on habitual attitudes and practices. This class will be about loosening up, about gaining more direct access to the kind of creative energy that allows real insight, real departure from the tropes and structures with which we are familiar. There will be in-class writing, but students are also asked to bring ten copies of two poems that they feel are somehow unlike what they usually write, and one copy of a poem by someone else that promotes for them a sense of great possibility.

• Meets: Saturday, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM, April 1, 2017
• Cost: $95 (One four-hour Saturday session)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Christopher Howell is the author of the forthcoming collection, Love’s Last Number: Poems (Milkweed Editions, February 2017). Among his many other books of poetry are Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His work has been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

Link to Workshop Flyer

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John Brehm

Thinking in Poetry

Too often we limit the range of our poems to lyric and narrative modes, either presenting a series of images or telling a story. But the greatest poetry gives us sustained thinking as well as seeing and saying. And the kind of thinking poets do involves the whole person—mind, heart, body, and spirit—and draws on everything from experience and memory to imagination and desire. In this six-week poetry workshop, weekly readings and prompts will encourage you to think expansively, freely, daringly in your poems.

• Meets: Mondays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, April 3 - May 8, 2017
• Cost:  $290 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland.

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Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage. This is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional, or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting necessary — although it's good if you've seen some plays. We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace, as we write and workshop one-act plays.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:30 - 9:30 PM, April 6 - May 11, 2017 [No class April 20]
• Cost:  $240 (Five three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Gay Monteverde is the author of two published plays: Harriet Tubman: An American Moses, which was a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education's Best New Play Award, and The Arabian Nights, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award's Angus Bowmer Award for Drama. Both plays premiered in Portland, are published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City, and have had productions in locations as far-ranging as Tasmania and Kentucky. Monteverde's third play was part of HART's recent Page to Stage showcase. She has taught college writing courses, including playwriting and creative writing, for over a decade in Portland.

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Marilyn Stablein

Start Where You Are: A Poet's Toolbox

In this workshop, we’ll look at a variety of tips, prompts and techniques to find ways of generating new poems: imaginative leaps, risks, revelations, confessions. Workshop participants are encouraged to bring ten copies of poems in progress – or their ideas for poems – to discuss and share. We will also do several in-class writing exercises to discuss and share. Both beginning and experienced writers will be encouraged to unleash and explore the poetics of reflection and place.

• Meets: Saturday, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM, April 15, 2017

Marilyn Stablein received Creative Writing degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Houston where she was a Cullen Fellow. her poems, stories, essays and reviews are widely published. Her book of poems Splitting Hard Ground won the New Mexico Book Award and the National Federation of Press Women’s Book Award. Other works include an ongoing series of prose poems, Night Travels to Tibet; a Himalayan memoir, Sleeping in Caves; and a collection of eco-essays, Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagination. Recent work includes “Revisiting Loba: Diane di Prima’s Epic Poem” and poetry published in Make It True: A Cascadia Anthology. A former book critic for the Seattle Times, she has received two Yaddo residency grants as well as awards for her work from the National Endowment for the Arts, King County and Seattle Arts Commissions, and the New York Council of the Arts.

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John Brehm

Reading as a Writer: The Poetry of Philip Larkin

Asked in an interview what he had learned from studying Auden, Yeats, and Hardy, Larkin replied: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t study poets! You read them, and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn.” In this reading-as-a-writer course, we will read the marvelous poems of Philip Larkin and talk about them and wonder at how he does it and see if we can do it too. Four of our six class meetings will be devoted to Larkin’s work; two meetings, the third and final sessions, will focus on the poems you write in response to Larkin’s work.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, January 17 - February 21, 2017

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland.

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Annie Lighthart

Love Poems: The Good, the Bad, and the Delightfully Strange

If you’ve been wary of writing love poems, or have had a folder of them stashed away for years, join us as we take a new look at love poetry. It’s true that love poetry is a wonderfully tricky form, but together we’ll read a range of vital poems and see what makes them tick. From forlorn to vibrant, from Rumi’s Friend to Christopher Smart’s cat, we’ll explore the many facets of love poems and try a variety of exercises to create our own. All levels of writing experience welcome.

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, February 11, 2017

Annie Lighthart started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. Since those first strange days, she published her poetry collection Iron String with Oregon’s Airlie Press. Her poetry has been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye to be placed in Ireland’s Galway University Hospitals as part of their Poems for Patience project.  Annie has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with students of all ages. She currently lives in a small green corner of Portland, Oregon.

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Marilyn Stablein

Handmade Artist Books & Journals for Artists & Writers

In this workshop we will explore how a handmade artist book can exhibit, house and inspire writing. We’ll also discover how art, image and object can inspire creative work. Each session will begin with a short illustrated craft talk followed by discussion, a short in-class writing exercise, sharing that writing and then hands-on work on an artist book project. We’ll make three handmade artist books (Accordion & variation; Explosion Pop-Up Book; and Portfolio.) Optional mixed media components include collage, drawing, mark-making, travel or nature journal excerpts, and personal memorabilia. Participants can also leave books blank for future projects or to give as gifts. The skills will be useful in many other creative projects. Open to beginning and experienced writers and artists.

• Meets: Three Saturdays, February 18, 25 & March 4, 2017 from 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM 

Marilyn Stablein is an artist, award-winning poet, writer and author of thirteen books and limited editions. She has exhibited her collage journals, shadow box assemblages and award-winning artist books at galleries, museums, universities in the U.S. and abroad and in books and journals including Bound and Lettered Magazine, Lark’s 1000 Artist Books and Lark’s 500 Artists Books Series. A monograph Bind, Alter, Fold (Book Arts Editions) features 38 of her handmade artist books. Recent or upcoming artist book workshops include the Newport (Oregon) Book & Paper Festival, Marin (California) Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Seattle Cascadia Poetry Festival.

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Andrea Hollander 

The Lyric Essay: A Writing Workshop

The lyric essay – what innovator John D’Agata calls an oddball genre—combines elements of both poetry and essays, relying on the former in its insistence on compression, form, and the sound and texture of language, and on the latter in its devotion to the process of discovery based on fact. In this workshop we will attempt to define the genre for ourselves not only by reading what others have to say about the craft of nonfiction writing and by examining exemplary essays by established and emerging writers, but also by creating our own essays, sometimes modeled on the work of others and at other times experimenting with our own gestures and forms.

• Meets:  9:30 AM - 12:30 PM, Wednesdays, September 7 - October 26

Andrea Hollander is author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012, finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women. Her first poetry collection, House without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Hollander’s other awards include two Pushcart Prizes (poetry and essay), the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the EllipsisPoetry Prize, the RUNES Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Literary Fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts. Before moving to Portland in 2011, Hollander spent 22 years as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

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John Brehm

Reading as a Writer: Lucia Perillo

This six-week reading-as-a-writer course focuses on the work of Lucia Perillo, one of the most original poets writing today. We’ll read and discuss poems from her most recent book, Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems, as well as essays from her collection I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, all with an eye toward how her work might open up new ways of approaching our own poetic practice. Participants will be invited to write poems in response to, or inspired by, Perillo’s work.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, September 13 - October 18, 2016
• Cost: $290 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, Maximum 12.
• Location:  Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 

John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland.

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Evan Morgan Williams

Short Story Workshop

Through discussion of model stories by authors Raymond Carver, Colette, Kafka, Hemingway, Maile Meloy and others, participants will share and revise short stories in a rigorous but encouraging workshop environment. The focus of this 8-session workshop, designed for a class maximum of 8 participants, will be on the critique, revision, and re-critique of existing stories (i.e., stories written prior to the class). Participants are asked to bring eight copies of an existing story to the first meeting of the class. There will be a one-week hiatus mid session for submission of e-copies.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:30 - 9:00 PM,  Sept. 20—Nov. 15, 2016 - with a one-week break October 18.
• Cost:  $320 (Eight sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, Maximum 8.
• Location:  Room 4, TaborSpace (5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215)

Evan Morgan Williams' collection of stories, Thorn, won the BkMk Press Chandra Prize (University of Missouri- Kansas City) judged by Al Young. Williams has published over forty stories in such magazines as Witness, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, and ZYZZYVA. He has an MFA from the University of Montana, and has taught in a public school for over twenty years. Most recently, he has held a Writers in the Schools residency and an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship. He has stories current in Phantom Drift, The Timberline Review, and Weber: the Contemporary West. He currently lives in Portland.

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Peter Sears

Fall 8-week Poetry Writing Workshop

This eight-week poetry-writing workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. Priority enrollment will be given to poets who have before taken the 8-week fall writing workshop with Peter Sears. Others may request that they be put on a wait list or, for those who have not taken the fall workshop, may apply.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., Thursdays, September 29 - November 17, 2016

• Cost: $385 [Eight three-hour sessions]

• Enrollment: Maximum 9.

• Location:  Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 

Peter Sears, who served a two-year term as Oregon Poet Laureate from 2014 - 2016, is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include Tour; The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. He also has two books on teaching writing, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland

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Peter Sears 
Eight-Week Poetry Workshop

This eight-week poetry workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. Priority enrollment will be given to poets who have attended prior writing workshops with Peter Sears.  

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., April 7 - May 26, 2016
• Cost:  $385 [Eight three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9 
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215

Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include Tour; The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. He also has two books on teaching writing, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

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Henry Hughes

Writing About Animals

In this three-hour workshop, attendees will discuss and practice writing about insects, fish, birds, mammals—whatever fascinates. “Whether wild or tame, dangerous or cuddly, food or friend, non-human animals are a big part of our lives,” says Henry Hughes, whose new collection of poetry, Bunch of Animals, explores and celebrates our connection to various other creatures on the planet. The workshop group will discuss ways to write about animals that utilize science, natural history, folklore and narratives of friendship. "Avoiding the excesses of over-personification and cute caricature," Hughes explains, "participants will learn to draft an animal poem that comes alive on the page.” Every participant will receive a free copy of Bunch of Animals. 

• Date & Time: Saturday, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM -  April 9, 2016
• Cost: $75  (one three-hour session)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 

Henry Hughes is the author of an angling memoir, Back Seat with Fish (Skyhorse, 2016) and four collections of poetry, including the Oregon Book Award-winning Men Holding Eggs, and most recently Bunch of Animals (Cloudbank Books, 2016). Hughes is the editor of the anthologies, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing (Knopf, 2011) and Fishing Stories (Knopf, 2013), and his reviews and essays appear regularly in Harvard Review. Hughes, who grew up on Long Island, New York, has lived in Oregon since 2002 and now teaches at Western Oregon University.

Barbara Drake

Creative Non-fiction Workshop

This is an informal creative writing workshop suitable for adults with mixed levels of experience. Creative non-fiction uses techniques of fiction to tell stories that are true. Life crises, family, character studies, food writing, natural history, pets, childhood memories, beliefs, interests, and obsessions are just a few possible topics. In-class writing exercises will help to find ideas and learn writing techniques. Emphasis will be on the very short creative essay, usually from one to three pages. We will share work and make friendly, constructive comments to help turn ideas into stories that are entertaining and interesting to others.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Tuesdays, April 12 - May 17, 2016 
• Cost: $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 4 participants
• Location: Multnomah Friends, 4312 SE Stark, Portland 97215 [Room 12, except May 3 in Social Hall]
•  

Barbara Drake is the author of both nonfiction and poetry. Her newest book, Morning Light (Oregon State University Press, 2014), is a memoir describing life in western Oregon’s Yamhill Valley and lessons she’s learned from her long stint of country living. Her earlier memoir, Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999. Drake’s books of poetry include Driving One Hundred (Windfall Press, 2009), Love at the Egyptian Theatre, What We Say to Strangers, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook, in print since 1983. Her writing appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Drake was born in Kansas, moved to Oregon in 1941, grew up in Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast and earned BA and MFA degrees from the University of Oregon. After teaching at Michigan State University, she returned to Oregon in 1983 to teach at Linfield College, retiring as Professor of English Emerita in 2007. Drake lives with her husband in rural Yamhill County Oregon.

Judith Pulman

Getting Your Writing Out There

Think your work is ready to get out into the world? In a supportive group, survey your creative goals and explore the many pathways to share your writing. Leave class with a plan to move your work out from the drawer and into the hearts and minds of others. Local readings, cover letters, conferences, and collaborations will be discussed. All levels. Ages 18 & Up.

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM, Saturday, March 12, 2016
• Cost: $95 (one four-hour Saturday session with a lunch break)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: GRW 108 Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty, Portland 97221              

Judith Pulman’s poems, essays, and interviews have been published in the Writer’s Chronicle, Brevity,Brevity, Los Angeles Review, Water~Stone Review, and Under the Gum Tree. She is currently collaboratively translating a manuscript of Russian poetry into English, a project that was funded by the Regional Arts & Culture Council in 2015. She has received commendations in writing contests and residencies. Judith holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and regularly teaches creative nonfiction, poetry, and all-genre classes focused on the joys of discovery.

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John Brehm

Reading as a Writer: Robert Frost

Robert Frost is one of America’s greatest poets but also one of the most misunderstood. Frost wrote more masterpieces, in my view, than any other American poet of the 20th century, and though he cultivated a persona of the grandfatherly farmer-poet dispensing homespun wisdom and simple country sayings, his poetry is in fact extraordinarily subtle, sophisticated, and emotionally complex. In this six-week course, we’ll explore the major poems, as well as selected essays and letters, all with an eye toward how reading Frost might open up new possibilities in our own work.

• Meets: Mondays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM
• Location: Cost:  $290 (Six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, Maximum 12.
• Location:  TaborSpace Library (5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215)

John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland.

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Judith Barrington

Reading as a Writer: Political Poets

Reading poems is an excellent way to find subjects or styles that trigger your own voice—make you want to run to a keyboard or pick up a pen immediately. Sometimes it’s the rhythm of someone else’s line that leads you into poetry or their declaration that spurs you into argument. This class, meeting on three Saturday mornings, will read and discuss a few poets who sometimes wrote political poems and use them as an impetus to generate some of your own. We’ll talk about a few of the debates regarding political or socially involved poetry and examine work by poets possibly including Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and Lucille Clifton. You will be able to write and share new work based on our discussions of the poems we examine.

• Date & Time: Saturdays, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
• Cost: $200
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 

Judith Barrington is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award.  Her Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the 2001 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. She has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program and has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain.

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Peter Sears

Writing from Prompts: A Poetry Workshop 
with Oregon's Poet Laureate

Join Oregon Poet Laureate Peter Sears on the Concordia University campus for a workshop dedicated to generating new work. After introductory remarks, Peter Sears will give a writing prompt to workshop participants, then allow some time for writing before making comments on the work that has been generated. The goal is for workshop participants to discover new ways to approach ideas for poems and to finish the session with new work. All levels of experience are welcome.

This is a perfect chance to qualify for admission to Peter's longer workshop sessions, offered in the fall and the spring. 

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, March 5, 2016
• Cost: $75 (a three-hour session that will include time for writing during the workshop)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 20
• Location: GRW 108 Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty, Portland 97221

Peter Sears, Oregon's current Poet Laureate,  is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

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Christopher Howell

Finding the Poem in the Poem 

Gary Snyder has said that he writes to find out what’s on his mind; William Stafford defined a poet as one who says things he would never have said had he not started to say them. These comments imply that writing cannot be entirely rational, something most poets know but tend to attach to the initial composition of poems. In considering the editing of drafts, we talk about the structuring of poems, about beginning and ending them, about the images and resonances that make them live; but how do we discover inside these embryonic objects the component arrangement that will create for the reader that condition or impulse our writing of the poem sought to answer? In this workshop we will examine how to edit our drafts in terms of their points of energy, rather than in terms of the rhetoric of intension and relative magnitude, how to approach the editing of our work as an act of discovery and, essentially, of liberation. Each student will need to come to class with ten copies of two poems, one of which, at least, in what the writer considers “rough” condition.

• Meets: 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, February 6, 2016
• Cost: $95 (one four-hour Saturday session)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 10.
• Location: GRW 108 Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty, Portland 97221

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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Annie Lighthart

Poetry and Its Sisters - Writing About Art

Whether giving voice to a painting, interpreting a statue, or confronting a photograph, poetry has always had a lot to say about its sister arts.  In this workshop we’ll take a look at a range of intriguing ekphrastic poems and see how they work and what they do.  We’ll also see what happens when we ourselves write in response to other art forms.  W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Rainer Maria Rilke and many others couldn’t resist the ekphrastic poem — come and see why.

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, February 13, 2016
• Cost: $85 (one three-hour Saturday sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: GRW 108 Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty, Portland 97221

Annie Lighthart started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest.  Since those first strange days, she published her poetry collection Iron String with Oregon’s Airlie Press.  Her poetry has been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye to be placed in Ireland’s Galway University Hospitals as part of their Poems for Patience project.  Annie has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with students of all ages.  She currently lives in a small green corner of Portland, Oregon.

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Marilyn Stablein

Introduction to Handmade Artist Books

This class will be useful to writers, artists and anyone interested in discovering alternative ways to display work either in unique one-of-a-kind presentations or to consider ways to self-publish small editions of their writing, art or a combination of both. The class will begin with a presentation of three basic book structures that anyone can make. We will then make the books and discuss optional ways to illustrate or insert personal memorabilia and/or written work. Writing examples could be a poem, excerpts from a travel journal or a favorite quotation. Another option is to leave the books blank for future projects or to give as gifts. The skills you learn—how to make an accordion book, a pamphlet stitched chapbook and a folded structure—will be useful in many other creative projects. For reference and inspiration Marilyn will share various books from her extensive collection of book manuals and guides.

• Date & Time: Saturday, February 20, 2016, 1:30 PM - 5:30 PM 
• Cost: $85 (one four-hour session)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: GRW 201 Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty, Portland 97221

Marilyn Stablein is an award-winning poet, essayist and book artist who has has exhibited her collage journals and award-winning artist books at universities including the University of California, University of Nebraska, Rhode Island School of Design, Concordia University and in books and journals including Bound and Lettered Magazine, Lark’s 1000 Artist Books and Lark’s 500 Artists Books Series. Her work has been shown in museums, libraries and galleries in the US and abroad. A recent color catalog of her artist books, Bind, Alter, Fold: Artist Books, published by Book Arts Editions (Portland, OR), was reviewed in the Vancouver Canada Sun, the Guild of Bookworkers Newsletter and Bound and Lettered magazine.

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Barbara Drake  

Writing the Long Poem

For a change of pace from the short lyric poem, in this workshop we will look at examples of long poems and experiment with ways to begin and structure longer work.  Possible models include narrative or story poems, journal poems, myths, monologues, collage poetry, meditations on a theme, and more. If you have a few bits and pieces of unfinished poems or single line jottings, journal selections, saved material such as quotes or clippings collected for writing ideas, or other incidental materials that appeal to your imagination, bring them to class as seed material.  If you prefer, we can also work from scratch.  In any case, this should be a way to stretch and experiment with your poetic potential.

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM, Saturday, February 27, 2016
• Cost:  $100 (one-day session)
• Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 4 participants
• Location: Multnomah Friends, 4312 SE Stark, Portland 97215

Barbara Drake is the author of both nonfiction and poetry. Her newest book, Morning Light (Oregon State University Press, 2014), is a memoir describing life in western Oregon’s Yamhill Valley and lessons she’s learned from her long stint of country living. Her earlier memoir, Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999. Drake’s books of poetry include Driving One Hundred (Windfall Press, 2009), Love at the Egyptian Theatre, What We Say to Strangers, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook, in print since 1983. Her writing appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Drake was born in Kansas, moved to Oregon in 1941, grew up in Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast and earned BA and MFA degrees from the University of Oregon. After teaching at Michigan State University, she returned to Oregon in 1983 to teach at Linfield College, retiring as Professor of English Emerita in 2007. Drake lives with her husband in rural Yamhill County Oregon.

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John Brehm

Reading as a Writer: A.R. Ammons & Ron Padgett

A.R. Ammons and Ron Padgett are two of the most inventive and wide-ranging poets America has produced. Like Whitman and Williams, they seem able to write about anything and everything—from how people trimmed their toenails in ancient times to how matter is transformed into spirit—and they do so in poems that are by turns heartfelt and hilarious, philosophical and playfully irreverent. In this eight-week reading-as-a-writer course, we’ll look closely at selections by each poet to see how they might open new possibilities for our own work. Two of our eight sessions will be devoted to student poems. 

• Meets: Mondays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, January 12 - February 29, 2016
• Location: Cost:  $385 (Eight three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, Maximum 12.
• Location:  TaborSpace Library (5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215)

John Brehm is the author of two books of poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland.

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Poetry Revision Workshop

Tuesdays, January 19 - March 1, 2016
6:30 - 9:00 PM

All levels are welcome to join in this revision workshop designed to address those poems that seem to have potential, but are just not working. Various Mountain Writers faculty will lead these evening sessions at TaborSpace in the Conference Room. Drop-ins are permitted, though advanced enrollment is advised because the space is limited to 10 persons (including the workshop leader).

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:00 PM, Tuesday, January 26 - March 1, 2016
• Cost: $50 per session or $275 for all 6 sessions
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 9.
• Location: TaborSpace Conference Room (5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215)

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Kate Gray

How to Approach Your Hot Mess.

Got a pile of writing? In this workshop you’ll explore ways to approach it and what your next steps might be. The workshop will include visualization, writing, discussion, and resources. No need to bring your work in; all you need is the desire to move ahead.

• Meets: 7:00-9:00 PM, Wednesday, January 13, 2016
• Cost: $75 (one two-hour session)
• Enrollment: Maximum 15/minimum 5 participants
• Location: Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 
  

Kate Gray’s first novel, Carry the Sky, (Forest Avenue Press, 2014) attempts to stare at bullying without blinking. Three collections of poems, Another Sunset We Survive (Cedar House, 2007), Bone-Knowing (Gertrude, 2006), and Where She Goes (Blue Light, 2000), capture her “first language”: poetry. Volunteering for Write Around Portland, she facilitates writing groups for female inmates in a correctional facility. Kate is a teacher and writing coach working from a purple house in Portland.

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Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage. This is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional, or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting necessary (although it's good if you've seen some plays). We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace, as we write and workshop one-act plays.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Thursdays, January 14 - February 28, 2016
• Cost: $290 Six three-hour sessions
  
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 
  

Gay Monteverde is the author of two published plays: Harriet Tubman: An American Moses (a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education's Best New Play Award) and The Arabian Nights (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award's Angus Bowmer Award for Drama). Both plays premiered in Portland, are published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City, and have had productions in locations as far-ranging as Tasmania and Kentucky. Gay's third play was part of HART's recent Page to Stage showcase.  She teaches writing at Portland Community College.

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Judith Barrington

Landscape & Memory

This workshop will address writing both poetry and prose with a particular emphasis on place. Whether exploring the natural world or a city neighborhood, we'll dig beneath the surface for  the history, personalities and stories rooted there. We’ll consider place as a significant “character” in your writing, rather then a mere setting. Selected readings and craft discussions will help participants generate new material, or take an existing draft to a new level. Anyone who has taken a memoir or poetry workshop before is welcome. Please read Writing the Memoir (Barrington) and/or The Conversation (Barrington) ahead of time.

• Meets: 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Oct. 31, Nov. 7, Nov. 14 & Nov. 21, 2015 (Four Saturdays)
• Cost: $300 [Four four-hour sessions.
• Enrollment: Minimum 5; maximum 15
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR     

Judith Barrington is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Conversation (2015), whose title poem was the winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International poetry award.  Her Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the 2001 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is also the author of the best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. She has been a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program and has taught workshops around the U.S. as well as in Britain and Spain.

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Marilyn Stablein

Introduction to Artist Books

This class will introduce techniques for creating three artist books that anyone can make. Each class will begin with a presentation with multiple examples of one book structure. We will then make the book and discuss optional illustration techniques or ways to insert writing —a poem, journal, excerpts from a travel journal — or other personal memorabilia. Another option is to leave the book blank for future projects or to give to a creative friend. The skills you learn—how to make an accordion book, a chapbook and a folded structure—will be useful in many other creative projects. A supply list with minimal tools like scissors, glue stick, writing tools and paper, will be sent before the first class. The instructor will share various books from her extensive collection of book manuals and guides.

• Meets: Saturday, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM - November 14, 21 & 28, 2015
• Cost: $150 (three three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 12, Multnomah Friends Meeting House - 4312 SE Stark - Portland 97215
  

Marilyn Stablein is an award-winning poet, essayist and book artist who has has exhibited her collage journals and award-winning artist books at universities including the University of California, University of Nebraska, Rhode Island School of Design, Concordia University and in books and journals including Bound and Lettered Magazine, Lark’s 1000 Artist Books and Lark’s 500 Artists Books Series. Her work has been shown in museums, libraries and galleries in the US and abroad. A recent color catalog of her artist books, Bind, Alter, Fold: Artist Books, published by Book Arts Editions (Portland, OR), was reviewed in the Vancouver Canada Sun, the Guild of Bookworkers Newsletter and Bound and Lettered magazine. Visit www.marilynstablein.com

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Annie Lighthart

Rilke for Writers

If you’ve been intrigued by the intense lyrics and beautiful elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke, join us as we explore the work of this remarkable poet. In this workshop we’ll look closely at a range of Rilke’s poems and techniques, uncover the myths and truths of his life and process, and try a variety of writing exercises inspired by Rilke’s work. With Rilke as our guide, we’ll follow his advice to “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves….”

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, October 17, 2015
• Cost: $75 (one three-hour Saturday session)
• Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 4 participants
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215

Annie Lighthart is the author of Iron String, published by Airlie Press in 2013.  She earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with community groups of all ages.  Annie’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Hunger Mountain, Cimarron Review, The Greensboro Reviewand other journals.  She writes and teaches in and around Portland, Oregon.

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Andrea Hollander 
The Lyric Essay: A Writing Workshop

The lyric essay – what innovator John D’Agata calls an oddball genre—combines elements of both poetry and essays, relying on the former in its insistence on compression, form, and the sound and texture of language, and on the latter in its devotion to the process of discovery based on fact. In this workshop we will attempt to define the genre for ourselves not only by reading what others have to say about the craft of nonfiction writing and by examining exemplary essays by established and emerging writers, but also by creating our own essays, sometimes modeled on the work of others and at other times experimenting with our own gestures and forms.

• Cost:  $385 (Eight three-hour sessions)
• Meets:  9:30 AM - 12:30 PM, Wednesdays, October 21 - December 9, 2015
• Enrollment:  Minimum 6, Maximum 9.
• Location: TaborSpace (5441 SE Belmont, Portland 97215)
• WORKSHOP IS FULL; WAIT LIST ONLY.

   

An award-winning poet and essayist, Andrea Hollander is author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012, finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women. Her first poetry collection, House without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Hollander’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. Before moving to Portland in 2011, Hollander spent 22 years as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

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Cindy Stewart-Rinier
Poetry Revision Workshop

Poetry Revision Workshop. All levels are welcome to join in this five-week workshop designed to address those poems that seem to have potential, but are just not working. Building on in-depth feedback regarding the existing strengths and weaknesses of each poem, participants will develop fresh strategies for revising them. Through model poems and other materials, we’ll look at entries and landings, tone, pacing, imagery, tension, form, structure, music, and the element of surprise. Participants will be required to submit a packet of four poems one week prior to the start date, and submit a revision of each on the second, third and fourth weeks.

• Meets: 6:45-9:00 PM, Thursday, October 1 - 29, 2015
• Cost: $185 [Five sessions]
• Enrollment: Minimum 5; maximum 10.
• Location: TaborSpace, Room 05 (5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215)

Cindy Stewart-Rinier holds an MFA in Creative Writing from PLU's Rainier Writing Workshop, has served as guest poetry editor for three editions of VoiceCatcher, and is an active board member of Mountain Writers Series. Her work has appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review, Ascent, Nagatuck River Review, Women's Voices for Change, New American Vocies, and VoiceCatcher, as well as the anthologies, Siblings: Our First Macrocos (Wising Up Press), and the forthcoming VoiceCatcher 10th Anniversary Anthology. Four poems have also been nominated for Pushcarts.

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Christopher Howell

How Do We Begin and Where Do We End?

A Poetry Writing Workshop

We will focus much of our discussion on two matters crucial to a poem’s total effect: how it opens (or may be opened) and how we determine that it has ended (or may be closed). Because these two movements (or moments) are common to all poetry and all levels, the class should be appropriate for both advanced and beginning writers. Students should come to class with ten copies of at least two of their own poems, plus one copy of a favorite poem that they feel demonstrates effective opening and closure.

• Meets:  9:00 a.m.– 1:00 PM, Saturday, October 3, 2015.
• Cost: $85 [One four-hour session]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 10.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215 -- Large meeting room on the 2nd Floor, west side of the building

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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Peter Sears
Fall 6-Week Poetry Writing Workshop

This six-week poetry workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. Priority enrollment will be given to poets who have attended prior writing workshops with Peter Sears. Those who have not attended earlier workshop sessions with Peter Sears should apply by submitting a $25 application fee along with 3-5 typewritten pages of poetry, no more than three poems, to Mountain Writers, 2804 SE 27th, Portland OR 97202. 

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Tuesdays, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., October 6 - November 10, 2015
• Cost:  $290 [Six three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9 
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215

Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include Tour; The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. He also has two books on teaching writing, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

New students must apply for workshop admission - see instructions above.

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Paulann Petersen

Wellspring - A Poetry Workshop

Wellspring. Where are poems born? From imagination. From memory. From dream, serendipity, risk-taking. Poems rise from that wellspring of language each of us possesses. This day-long workshop will be devoted to tapping into that wellspring. Using her springboard method, Paulann hopes to prompt each participant into generating as much new work as possible. Her goal is to have each writer leave the workshop with pages and pages of new writing ready to be crafted into poems or prose. All levels of experience welcome. The only requirement is a willingness to surrender the day to writing.

• Meets: 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Saturday, September 26, 2015 - one-hour break for lunch
• Cost: $100 [a six-hour workshop]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 20.
• Location: Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR Room GRW 108

Paulann Petersen is the author of six books of poems, The Wild Awake (2002), A Bride of Narrow Escape (2006), Kindle (2008), The Voluptuary (2010), and, most recently, Understory (Lost Horse Press, 2013), as well as five chapbooks. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has published work in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She has served on the board for Friends of William Stafford, and in 2006 she was awarded the Holbrook Award from Literary Arts. In addition to teaching for Mountain Writers, she has taught workshops for The Attic, Fishtrap, Oregon Poetry Association, and the Northwest Writing Institute. From 2010 – 2014 she served as Oregon's sixth Poet Laureate.  She makes her home in Portland.

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Gay Monteverde

Writing for the Stage

Writing for the Stage. This is a beginning playwriting workshop for the eager amateur, the emerging professional, or the curious writer exploring a new medium. No previous experience with playwriting necessary (although it's good if you've seen some plays). We will read and discuss plot, character, dialogue, theme, spectacle and pace, as we write and workshop one-act plays.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Tuesdays, September 1 - 29, 2015
• Cost: $240 [Five three-hour sessions.
  
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR
  

Gay Monteverde is the author of two published plays: Harriet Tubman: An American Moses (a finalist for the American Alliance of Theater and Education's Best New Play Award) and The Arabian Nights (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award's Angus Bowmer Award for Drama). Both plays premiered in Portland, are published by Playscripts, Inc. in New York City, and have had productions in locations as far-ranging as Tasmania and Kentucky. Gay Monteverde is currently finishing her third play, and teaches writing at Portland Community College.

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Peter Sears
Fall 8-Week Thursday Poetry Workshop

This eight-week poetry workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. Priority enrollment will be given to poets who have attended prior writing workshops with Peter Sears. Those who have not attended earlier workshop sessions with Peter Sears should apply by submitting a $25 application fee along with 3-5 typewritten pages of poetry, no more than three poems, to Mountain Writers, 2804 SE 27th, Portland OR 97202.

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., September 24 - November 12, 2015
• Cost:  $385 [Eight three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215

Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include Tour; The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. He also has two books on teaching writing, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

New students must apply for workshop admission - see instructions above.

Registration for established students is now open. 

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Marilyn Stablein

The Art of Memoir: Stories That Resonate

Your life is your material. Whether you are a poet, artist, prose writer or just starting to write, this workshop will help you gain confidence and develop skills to create dynamic writing that reflects your unique life experiences.  For inspiration we’ll look at excerpts from Annie Dillard, Paul Auster, Rick Bass, Joan Didion, and Naguib Mahfouz (Dreams.)  We’ll discuss sources of poetic creativity and look briefly at writers who are also artists.  Learn ways to expand sketches and vignettes into short personal essays and creative memoirs.  We will share and discuss new writing in a stimulating and supportive environment.

• Meets: Wednesdays, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, July 15, 22 & 29, 2015 
• Cost: $150 (three three-hour Saturday sessions)
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215
• Enrollment: Maximum 12/minimum 4 participants

Marilyn Stablein's essays and creative nonfiction memoirs have been published in The Sun, The National Enquirer, The Seattle Review, the Kyoto Journal, Zyzzyva, and in anthologies including The Truth About the Territory: Contemporary Nonfiction from the Northwest and Wake Up and Cook: Kitchen Buddhism in Words and Images (Riverhead Books). Her memoirs include Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagination, a collection of eco essays set in the Northwest, and Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir, which recounts adventures from her six-year residency in the Himalayas. Book Arts Editions recently published an illustrated chapbook, A Pot of Soup. 

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Marilyn Stablein

Introduction to Artist Books

This class will introduce three simple artist books anyone can make. Each class will begin with a presentation with multiple examples of one book structure. We will then make the book and discuss ways to insert writing e.g. a poem, journal, letter or quote. Learn optional illustration techniques or leave blank. The skills you learn—how to make an accordion book, a chapbook and a folded structure—will be useful in many projects. A supply list with minimal tools like scissors, glue stick, writing tools and paper, will be sent before the first class.

• Date & Time: Saturday, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM - July 18, July 25 & August 1, 2015
• Cost: $150 (three three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 12
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House - 4312 SE Stark - Portland 97215 
  

Marilyn Stablein, poet and essayist, has exhibited her collage journals and award-winning artist books at universities, museums, libraries and galleries in the US and abroad. Recent work has been exhibited at the University of California, University of Nebraska, Rhode Island School of Design and in books and journals. Book Arts Editions will publish a catalog of her artist books in 2015.

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John Brehm
Writing the Short Poem

Shakespeare said it best: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” In this six-week poetry workshop, we’ll explore the pleasures of compression, the reverberations of a single gesture, the freedom of just saying one thing. We’ll look at examples by A.R. Ammons, Anna Swir, Yannis Ritsos, Ron Padgett, Kay Ryan, Frank O’Hara, Anna Kamienska, Tomas Transtromer, and others, as well as ancient Chinese and Japanese poets. Weekly prompts will guide you to try your hand at different kinds of short poems and to devise a distinctive short form of your own.

• Meets: Mondays, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM, July 6 [no class August 3] – August 17, 2015
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, maximum 12 participants
• Cost:  $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Location: TaborSpace (5441 SE Belmont, Portland 97215)

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry, Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press, and the chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002). From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press, where he was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He has taught at Cornell University, Emerson College, and Portland State. In addition to serving as regular faculty for Mountain Writers, Brehm teaches for Literary Arts in Portland and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. He has received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. 

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Andrea Hollander 
Poetry as Portraiture: A Writing Workshop

Every work of art not only presents a portrait of its subject but also reveals—sometimes unconsciously—at least a partial portrait of the artist who created it. Think of the paintings of Hopper and those of Picasso, the music of Mozart and that of Schoenberg, the novels of Joyce and Brontë. Different aesthetics? Yes. But much more than that. In this workshop intended for experienced (but not necessarily published) poets, we will examine poems that vividly portray their subjects and at the same time reveal the artist otherwise “hidden” within them, whether or not the poems in question are meant to be confessional or even biographical. How may we embrace such truths and exploit them wisely in our own work? Be prepared to draft, revise, and discuss new poems in a supportive and attentive atmosphere.

• Meets: Wednesdays, 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM, June 24 – July 29, 2015
• Enrollment: Minimum 6, maximum 12 participants
• Cost:  $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Location: TaborSpace (5441 SE Belmont, Portland 97215)

An award-winning poet and essayist, Andrea Hollander is author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012, finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women. Her first poetry collection, House without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Hollander’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. Before moving to Portland in 2011, Hollander spent 22 years as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

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Annie Lighthart

The Prose Poem

The Prose Poem. Come and try a taste of the prose poem, that strange and wonderful concoction of poetry and prose. In the first session of this two-part workshop, we’ll sort through the elements of this fascinating form and read a selection of poems from writers old and new.  As author David Young says, “The prose poem is a very special invention, like a chair that flies...."  In the first session, we’ll see what gives it wings.  In the weeks between sessions, we’ll write our own prose poems and then meet again in the second session to share them and talk about how we can continue to experiment with this remarkably rich, fun and feisty form of poetry.  All levels of experience welcome.

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, June 13 & Saturday, June 27, 2015
• Cost: $100 (two three-hour Saturday sessions)
• Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 4 participants
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215

Annie Lighthart is the author of Iron String, published by Airlie Press in 2013.  She earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with community groups of all ages.  Annie’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Hunger Mountain, Cimarron Review, The Greensboro Reviewand other journals.  She writes and teaches in and around Portland, Oregon.

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Christopher Howell

How Do We Begin? And Where Do We End?

How do we begin and where do we end?  We will focus much of our discussion on two matters crucial to a poem’s total effect:  how it opens (or may be opened) and how we determine that it has ended (or may be closed).  Because these two movements (or moments) are common to all poetry and all levels, the class should be appropriate for both advanced and beginning writers.  Students should come to class with ten copies of at least two of their own poems, plus one copy of a favorite poem that they feel demonstrates effective opening and closure.

• Meets:  9:00 a.m.- 1:00 PM, Saturday, May 2, 2015.
• Cost: $75 [One four-hour session]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 10.
• Location: TaborSpace (5441 SE Belmont, Portland 97215)

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010).  He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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Lidia Yuknavitch

The Voice Is A Muscle: A Writing Workshop

The Voice Is A Muscle. Developing "voice" in fiction and nonfiction both is a tricky business. If it is your own voice, how to manage the tone and affect and what forms to bring to your story in order to get the truths to resonate takes practice. If it is a character's voice, what forms and strategies are available for making that voice distinct, vivid, and powerful enough to carry part of the story? In this workshop we will tease out the wide varieties of voice strategies available to prose writers and practice the fine art of building voices that no one can forget. In the process we will develop a series of metaphors that match the voices you call forth in your writing. You will go home hearing voices in the best of ways.

• Meets:  6:30-9:30 PM, four Tuesdays (bi-weekly), April 14 & 28, May 12 & 26, 2015
• Cost: $200 (four 3-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4. Maximum 12.
• Location:  Room 12, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the award-winning memoir, The Chronology of Water, the novel, Dora: A Head Case; and three previous collections of short stories, Her Other Mouths, Liberty's Excess, and Real to Reel. Her forthcoming novel, The Backs of Small Children, will be published by Harper this year. Her stories and creative nonfiction appear widely in literary journals and anthologies. The recipient of awards from Literary Arts, Poets and Writers, and the Oregon Arts Council, she teaches writing, literature and women's studies at Mt. Hood Community College. Yuknavitch lives in Portland with her writer/filmmaker husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles.  

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Peter Sears
Spring Poetry Writing Workshop

This eight-week poetry-writing is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. Priority enrollment will be given to poets who have attended prior writing workshops with Peter Sears. Those who have not attended earlier workshop sessions with Peter Sears should apply by submitting a $50 application fee along with 3-5 typewritten pages of poetry, no more than three poems, to Mountain Writers, 2804 SE 27th, Portland OR 97202.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Tuesdays, 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., April 14 - June 2, 2015
• Cost:  $385 [Eight three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9 - Workshop is full. Wait list only.
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215

Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include Tour; The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. He also has two books on teaching writing, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

On April 25, 2014, Governor Kitzhaber appointed Peter Sears Oregon’s seventh Poet Laureate.

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John Brehm

Reading as a Writer: Adrienne Rich, Anne Carson and Lucia Perillo

Adrienne Rich, Anne Carson, and Lucia Perillo are three of the most distinctive voices in contemporary North American poetry. In this six-week Reading as a Writer course, we’ll focus on Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language (1977); Carson's Glass, Irony, and God (1995); and Perillo’s On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (2012). We’ll discuss the architecture of each book; the unique rhythms, sound patterns, and intellectual disposition of each poet; as well as the thematic threads that run through each volume and between volumes—all with an eye (and an ear) toward how these poets might help us with our own work. We will divide class time between discussing Rich, Carson, and Perillo and workshopping the poems you write in response to their work. 

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, April 2 - May 14, 2015
• Cost:  $290 (6 three-hour sessions) [No class April 30]
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, maximum 14 participants.

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry, Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press, and the chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002). From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press, where he was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He has taught at Cornell University, Emerson College, and Portland State. In addition to serving as regular faculty for Mountain Writers, Brehm teaches for Literary Arts in Portland and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. He has received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. 

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Kim Cooper Findling

Magazine Writing 101

Interested in writing for magazines but don’t know how the business works or how to break in? Get a grip on the basics in this hands-on workshop taught by a longtime magazine writer and editor. Learn how to decipher magazine markets, navigate writer’s guidelines, gather ideas, and successfully pitch ideas and win assignments. Come prepared for activities and interaction, and plan to leave with at least one solid idea, shaped and ready to professionally take to the magazine market.

• Date & Time: 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, April 4, 2015
• Cost: $85 (a four-hour Saturday session)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 15
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark Street, Portland 97215

Kim Cooper Findling is an award-winning writer and editor of travel, lifestyle, essay, memoir and journalism. She is the editor of Cascade Journal, the author of Day Trips From Portland: Getaway Ideas for the Local Traveler and Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, a writer/ambassador for Travel Oregon, a longtime freelance journalist for dozens of national publications and a teacher of writing workshops for children and adults. She lives with her family in Bend, Oregon.

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Paulann Petersen

• First, Create. This day-long workshop is generative, dedicated to creating new work. Using my springboard technique, I’ll ask you to turn yourselves loose in the river of words, letting language carry you along in its current, generating pages of new writing as you go. My goal is to have you leave the workshop with an outpouring of new material.

• Then, Shape. The second workshop is dedicated to revision, a most wonderful kind of shaping. We’ll spend the session critiquing and looking at possible directions for strengthening the poems you’ll be asked to submit prior to the workshop, and- if you took the first of these workshops—I’ll encourage you to submit some of that work.

Participants who take both workshops will receive a discount. It’s fine to take the second workshop without having been in the first - or the first without being part of the second. Each session will run from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, with an hour’s break for lunch, and will be held in the library on the Concordia University campus [Rooms GRW 108 and GRW 303].

• First, Create. meets 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Saturday, March 28, 2015
• Enrollment: Limit 20 participants
• Cost: $100 [$200 for both workshops]
• Location: Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR Room GRW 108

• Then, Shape. meets 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Saturday, April 11, 2015
• Enrollment: Limit 12 participants
• Cost: $125 [$200 for both workshops]
• Location: Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR Room GRW 303

Paulann Petersen is the author of six books of poems, The Wild Awake (2002), A Bride of Narrow Escape (2006), Kindle (2008), The Voluptuary (2010), and, most recently, Understory (Lost Horse Press, 2013), as well as five chapbooks. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has published work in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She has served on the board for Friends of William Stafford, and in 2006 she was awarded the Holbrook Award from Literary Arts. In addition to teaching for Mountain Writers, she has taught workshops for The Attic, Fishtrap, Oregon Poetry Association, and the Northwest Writing Institute. From 2010 – 2014 she served as Oregon's sixth Poet Laureate.  She makes her home in Portland.

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Andrea Hollander 
Line & Stanza: A Poetry Elements Workshop

Line and Stanza: A Poetry Elements Workshop. One of the least understood tools of composing good poems is what is commonly referred to as the line break. In this one-day workshop, we will focus on understanding the nature of the line and the stanza, and on learning how to make the most advantageous decisions about where to end lines, stanzas, and sentences, as well as where to best end poems themselves.

• Meets:  9:30 AM—4:30 PM, Saturday, March 21, 2015 
• Enrollment: Limit 12 participants
• Cost: $125 [one-day session]
• Location: Concordia University Library, 2900 NE Liberty Street, Portland OR

An award-winning poet and essayist, Andrea Hollander is author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012, finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women. Her first poetry collection, House without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Hollander’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. Before moving to Portland in 2011, Hollander spent 22 years as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

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John Brehm

Writing the Poems Only You Can Write

Every experience, every thought, every moment of awareness is both unique to us and in some way universal. In this six-week workshop, you’ll be encouraged to write the poems that only you can write, to explore those experiences and distinctive ways of looking at the world that have made you who you are. We’ll also experiment with present-moment poetry—poetry that springs from and responds to whatever is happening (externally, internally) right now. I’ll bring in examples from published poems and provide weekly prompts to guide you.  

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, February 19 - March 26, 2015
• Cost:  $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, maximum 12 participants

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry, Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press, and the chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002). From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press, where he was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He has taught at Cornell University, Emerson College, and Portland State. In addition to serving as regular faculty for Mountain Writers, Brehm teaches for Literary Arts in Portland and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. He has received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. 

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Annie Lighthart

Dickinson and Whitman for Writers

Come write, read, and sit at the table with two remarkable poetry guides: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Instead of seeing these poets as untouchable literary ancestors, in this two-part workshop we’ll take a look at the very practical things we can learn from them as fellow writers who loved and struggled with this craft. Together we’ll read poems by each author (Whitman the first session, Dickinson the second) and try a variety of writing exercises suggested by their work and ideas. We’ll see, for example, what happens when we bring Dickinson’s famous dashes into our own poems or when we stretch out into Whitman’s long lines. If you’ve been wary of either poet, or simply curious about them, this is a great way to make discoveries about their writing, as well as your own.  All levels of experience welcome.

• Meets: 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturday, Feb. 21 & 28, 2015
• Cost: $100 (two three-hour Saturday sessions)
• Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 4 participants
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Annie Lighthart is the author of Iron String, published by Airlie Press in 2013.  She earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with community groups of all ages.  Annie’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Hunger Mountain, Cimarron Review, The Greensboro Reviewand other journals.  She writes and teaches in and around Portland, Oregon.

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Barbara Drake 

Creative Non-fiction: A Writing Workshop. This is an informal creative writing workshop suitable for adults with mixed levels of experience. Creative non-fiction uses techniques of fiction to tell stories that are true. Life crises, family, character studies, food writing, natural history, pets, childhood memories, beliefs, interests, and obsessions are just a few possible topics. In-class writing exercises will help to find ideas and learn writing techniques. Emphasis will be on the very short creative essay, usually from one to three pages. We will share work and make friendly, constructive comments to help turn ideas into stories that are entertaining and interesting to others.

• Meets: 6:00 - 9:00 PM, Tuesdays, February 24– April 7 [no class March24]
• Cost: $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Maximum 12/minimum 4 participants
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Barbara Drake is the author of both nonfiction and poetry. Her newest book, Morning Light (Oregon State University Press, 2014), is a memoir describing life in western Oregon’s Yamhill Valley and lessons she’s learned from her long stint of country living. Her earlier memoir, Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999. Drake’s books of poetry include Driving One Hundred (Windfall Press, 2009), Love at the Egyptian Theatre, What We Say to Strangers, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook, in print since 1983. Her writing appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Drake was born in Kansas, moved to Oregon in 1941, grew up in Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast and earned BA and MFA degrees from the University of Oregon. After teaching at Michigan State University, she returned to Oregon in 1983 to teach at Linfield College, retiring as Professor of English Emerita in 2007. Drake lives with her husband in rural Yamhill County Oregon.

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Christopher Howell 

Image and Voice: A Workshop. Ezra Pound said that poetry is comprised of a variable and a constant. There are all kinds of ways of interpreting this binary assertion. In this class we will think of these elements in terms of image and voice, their interplay and their effect on a poem’s movement and structure, and will discuss student work in these terms. Students will be asked to submit two poems electronically before the workshop for consideration in this class; please bring 10 copies of those two poems to the workshop. Also, please bring a poem you admire by someone else to be read to the group.

• Meets:  9:30 a.m.- 12:30 PM, Saturday, February 7, 2015.
• Cost: $75 [One three-hour session]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 10.
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010).  He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts.  His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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John Brehm

ELIZABETH BISHOP AND THE ART OF SEEING. In a letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop wrote: “My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish—but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it?” No American poet had a more passionately accurate eye than Elizabeth Bishop. In this six-week course we’ll read and discuss Bishop’s major poems to see how her poetic practice might deepen and sharpen our own. We’ll also work with prompts based on Bishop’s poetry, and workshopping the poems you write in response to Bishop will be an integral part of the course.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, January 6 - February 10, 2015
• Cost:  $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House - 4312 SE Stark - Portland 97215
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, maximum 14 participants. WORKSHOP IS FULL.

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry, Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press, and the chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002). From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press, where he was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He has taught at Cornell University, Emerson College, and Portland State. In addition to serving as regular faculty for Mountain Writers, Brehm teaches for Literary Arts in Portland and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. He has received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon. 

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Gary Miranda

 "Labour to be beautiful" (Yeats): A Workshop in Poetic Form. This workshop is designed for poets who wish to expand their repertoire to include employing traditional prosody in contemporary ways. The emphasis will be on the use of meter and rhyme and variations on such forms as the ballad stanza, the sonnet, couplets, blank verse, and some of the French forms such as the villanelle and sestina. Examples will be taken from A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Meredith, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, W. D. Snodgrass and others. The premise of the workshop is simple: the discipline of mastering formal prosody will strengthen all of your writing, even your prose. And it’s fun!

• Meets: Thursdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, January 15 - March 5, 2015
• Cost:  $385 (eight 3-hour sessions)
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, maximum 10 participants.
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House - 4312 SE Stark - Portland 97215

Gary Miranda served as writer-in-residence at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has taught writing and literature at various other colleges and universities, including three years as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Athens in Greece. He has published four book-length collections, one of which, Listeners at the Breathing Place, won the Princeton Contemporary Poetry competition and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has also published a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. His poems, widely anthologized, have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review, and have been taped for Harvard University’s Lamont Poetry Collection and the Library of Congress Poetry Archive. Miranda has received nine awards from the Poetry Society of America, an NEA fellowship, and an invitation by The Atlantic Monthly to serve as poet-in-residence at the Robert Frost Place in New Hampshire. A board member for the non-profit Friends of Clyde Rice and The Rice Place, Miranda lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Marilyn Stablein

The Art of Memoir: Your Story Your Way. This workshop will help writers gain the confidence and skills needed to identify and express important experiences.  Learn the basics of developing and writing engaging stories. In-class exercises and discussion will introduce memoir-writing styles and themes to enrich the memoir experience. We will discuss excerpts from writers as diverse as Michel de Montaigne, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Sei Shonagon, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard and Gretel Ehrlich. Workshop will include handouts and suggestions for editing and preparing work for publication. Open to beginning and experienced writers.

• Meets: Saturdays, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM, January 10, 17 & 24, 2015 
• Cost: $150 (three three-hour Saturday sessions)
• Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Maximum 12/minimum 4 participants

Marilyn Stablein is the award-winning author of twelve books including Splitting Hard Ground winner of the New Mexico Book Award and the National Federation of Press Women's Book Award, Sleeping in Caves, a Himalayan Memoir and a collection of eco-essays, Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagination. A former book critic for The Seattle Times, founding board member of Seattle Arts and Lectures, and co-owner of Anthology Booksellers, she received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston where she worked with Phillip Lopate and Donald Barthelme. 

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Andrea Hollander 

The Poetic Sequence. We often encounter poetry collections that either contain or consist entirely of a poetic sequence, be they chapbooks, designated sections of full-length books, or entire books themselves. In our own work, more often than we perhaps realize, we create intrinsically linked poems that could be gathered and eventually published as a sequence. Should we set out to create such sequences, and if we do, how might we go about the process? In this workshop for experienced (but not necessarily published) poets, we will examine significant poetic sequences by several contemporary writers and try creating such sequences ourselves.

• Meets:  9:30 AM—12:30 PM, Wednesdays, October 29 - December 17, 2014
• Cost:  $385 (Eight 3-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, Maximum 10
• Location:  TaborSpace —  5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215.

An award-winning poet and essayist, Andrea Hollander (formerly Andrea Hollander Budy) is author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012 (Autumn House Press, 2013). She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009). Her awards include a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. For twenty-two years Hollander was the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

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Peter Sears 
Fall 2014 Poetry Writing Workshop #1

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Thursdays, September 25 - November 13, 2014
• Cost:  $385 (8 three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9
• Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Peter Sears
Fall 2014 Poetry Writing Workshop #2

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Tuesdays, October 14 - November 18, 2014
• Cost:  $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9
• Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Small Talk: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2014). Previous books of poetry include Tour; The Brink, which received the Gibbs-Smith poetry prize and the Western States Book Award for Poetry; and Green Diver; as well as a number of poetry chapbooks. He also has two books on teaching writing, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sears has taught at Reed College, Pacific's low-residency MFA program, and in numerous community-based programs, including Mountain Writers Series year-round writing workshops. He has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founder of Friends of William Stafford and Cloudbank Books. He serves on the board of advisors for Fishtrap, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

On April 25, 2014, Governor Kitzhaber appointed Peter Sears Oregon’s seventh Poet Laureate.

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                           _______________________________________________

Cindy Stewart-Rinier

Fall 2014 Poetry Writing Workshop

Fall 2014 Poetry Workshop.  All levels are welcome to join in this six-session, bi-monthly workshop. We’ll begin each three-hour segment with a focused exploration of a particular aspect of poetry writing, supported by selected readings of essay excerpts provided beforehand, as well as model poems provided at the time of the workshop. Following discussion, participants will write for 15-20 minutes from a menu of related prompts, with the last two hours dedicated to reading and discussing work submitted in the previous session. Revisions will be encouraged.     

• Meets: 6:00-9:00 PM, Wednesday, Sept. 10 & 24, Oct. 8 & 22, Nov. 5 & 12, 2014
• Location: Mountain Writer Series offices, 2828 SE 27th St #B, Portland, OR 97202
• Cost: $285 [Six three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 10.

Cindy Stewart-Rinier holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review, Ascent, VoiceCatcher, and [forthcoming] the Naugatuck River Review. A Pre-Kindergarten teacher by day, she also teaches evening poetry writing workshops for Mountain Writers Series and serves on their board of directors. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her younger son, her bandy-legged Pitbull, and her husband of 31 years.   

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   ___________________________________________

John Brehm

Writing the Skinny Poem

Writing the Skinny Poem Poets like William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, James Schuyler, Philip Booth, Kay Ryan, and others have brilliantly exploited the possibilities of "the skinny poem"—a poem characterized by short lines and strong enjambment and whose primary motion is down the page rather than across it. In this six-week writing workshop, we’ll read examples by the poets mentioned above and explore the different kinds of pacing, tone, rhythm, texture, voice, and content that skinny poems can generate in your own work. We’ll use writing exercises to generate variety within the skinny poem form.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, September 2 - October 7, 2014
• Cost:  $290 (6 three-hour sessions)
• Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, maximum 10 participants.

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches for Literary Arts and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. 

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Martha Gies 
Stories Waiting to be Written: A Fiction Workshop

Stories Waiting to be Written: This introductory workshop provides a nurturing and respectful environment in which to study the craft of writing fiction. Over the course of five meetings, we will discuss how to turn real events into short stories as we study short works by John Cheever, James Joyce, Eudora Welty and Joy Williams. Instructor will assign written exercises on point of view, narrative time, setting, and other basic elements. Participants write and submit one story for critique, where they will receive thoughtful response to their work. While the workshop is intended for beginners, experienced writers with the “humble but eager heart of the beginner” are also welcome.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:30 - 9:30 PM, September 2 - 30, 2014      
• Cost: $245 (5 three-hour sessions)
• Location: Home of the instructor near east end of Broadway Bridge, Portland.
• Enrollment: Minimum 9, maximum 9 participants.

Martha Gies has been publishing journalism, fiction, essays, travel and memoir for three decades. She is a former correspondent for Variety and a long-time supporter and editorial advisor for Street Roots. Her fiction appears in many lit mags, including Orion, Zyzzyva and Notre Dame Review, along with various anthologies. In 2004, Oregon State University Press published Up All Night, her portrait of Portland told through the stories of 23 people who work graveyard shift. Gies has taught creative writing for 25 years, principally at Marylhurst University, the graduate writing program at Lewis & Clark, Traveler’s Mind workshops abroad and The Attic, as well as Mountain Writers. Her own teachers were Raymond Carver, María Irene Fornés and public libraries around the continent.

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John Brehm

The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy

The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.  Join award-winning poet John Brehm for this writing workshop that will take place at The Rice Place on the Clackamas River. The two day-long classes will incorporate guided meditations, writing exercises, and walking meditation as well as discussion of an extraordinary range of poets—from Tu Fu, Saigy , Basho, Ry kan, and Issa to Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, A.R. Ammons, Yanis Ritsos, Wislawa Szymborska, Ron Padgett, Ellen Bass, and many others—all on the themes of impermanence, mindfulness, and joy. This workshop is ideally suited to the 10-acre, largely natural green space on the Clackamas River now preserved for use by writers, musicians, artists, naturalists, and others who seek a safe haven in which to reflect and create. Mountain Writers Series is happy to partner with The Friends of Clyde Rice in scheduling literary workshops, classes and retreats in this historic location.

• Meets: Saturday, 10 AM - 4 PM, August 9 & August 16, 2014
• Cost: $200 (2 day-long sessions)
• Location: The Rice Place, 17180 SE Eilers Circle, Damascus, OR 97089
• Enrollment: Minimum 4, maximum 10 participants.

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches for Literary Arts and The Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. 

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Christopher Howell 

Image and Voice: A Workshop

Image and Voice: A Workshop. Ezra Pound said that poetry is comprised of a variable and a constant.  There are all kinds of ways of interpreting this binary assertion; in this class we will think of these elements in terms of Image and Voice, their differential, their interplay, their effect on a poem’s movement and structure, and will discuss student work in these terms.  Other examples of how each facet may be made to function will, time permitting, be followed by some corresponding in-class writing and some assignments which may be pursued outside of class.  Please bring with you ten copies of at least three of you own poems, plus a poem you admire by someone else.

• Meets:  10:00 a.m.- 4:00 PM, Saturday, August 2, 2014
• Location: Mountain Writer Series offices, 2804 SE 27th, Portland, OR 97202
• Cost: $100 [One-day session with "working" lunch break]
• Enrollment: Minimum 4; maximum 10.

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). Additionally, his poems, translations, and essays have been frequently and widely published in anthologies and journals, including Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Denver Quarterly, Field, Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, Iowa Review and The Southern Review.  He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts.  His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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Annie Lighthart

Small and Beguiling:  A Short Poem Workshop

The short poem is a beguiling creature, offering hope to tired and harried writers while revealing surprising depths and distances within its bounds.  In this workshop we’ll read small poems with large hearts as well as tiny poems that expand to encompass wide places of the mind, seeking how they work their magic.  We’ll also generate our own poems and play with a variety of options offered by this encouraging, intense, and versatile form.   All levels of experience welcome.

• Meets: 10:00 a.m.— 1:-00 PM 
• Cost: $50 (one three-hour session)
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 4 participants

Annie Lighthart is the author of Iron String, published by Airlie Press in 2013.  She earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and with community groups of all ages.  Annie’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Hunger Mountain, Cimarron Review, The Greensboro Reviewand other journals.  She writes and teaches in and around Portland, Oregon.

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Andrea Hollander 
The Lyric Essay:   A Writing Workshop

The lyric essay—what innovator John D’Agata calls an oddball genre—combines elements of both poetry and essays, relying on the former in its insistence on compression, form, and the sound and texture of language, and on the latter in its devotion to the process of discovery based on fact. In this workshop we will attempt to define the genre for ourselves by not only reading what others have to say about the craft of nonfiction writing and by examining exemplary essays by established and emerging writers, but also by creating our own essays, sometimes modeled on the work of others and at other times experimenting with our own gestures and forms.

• Meets: 6:00 - 9:00 PM, Mondays, June 9 - July 28, 2014
• Cost:  $325 (Eight three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 9
• Location: TaborSpace , 5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215 

An award-winning poet and essayist, Andrea Hollander(formerly Andrea Hollander Budy) is author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012 (Autumn House Press, 2013). She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009). Her awards include a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. For twenty-two years Hollander has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

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Marilyn Stablein
Looking Back/Looking Within: Writing Your Life Stories

A Memoir Writing Workshop

In this spirited workshop we will explore various prose styles and ways to engage memory, re-envision experience and stimulate imagination to create unique personal stories.  Emphasis will be on creating new work and developing good habits to nurture the writer’s work.  There will be handouts with weekly exercises and discussions of excerpts from writers as diverse as Michel de Montaigne, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Sei Shonagon, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard and Gretel Ehrlich.  Participants will benefit from sharing work with others to get feedback for revisions. Open to beginning and experienced writers. 

• Meets: 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Saturdays, June 7, 14 & 21, 2014
• Cost:  $225 (Three three-hour sessions, with morning coffee break)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 4, maximum 12
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Marilyn Stablein is the award winning author of twelve books including a collection of personal essays, Climate of Extremes: Landscape and Imagination and the memoir Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir. Her book of poems Splitting Hard Ground won the New Mexico Book Award. She studied creative writing at the University of Washington (B.A.) and the University of Houston (M.A. in creative writing). Widely published and included in numerous anthologies, she has taught writing workshops in Seattle, Taos, Berkeley, Houston and New York. She is also a visual artist and bookseller at Anthology Booksellers. Hawthorne. Visit marilynstablein.com

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Christopher Howell

The Poem as Interaction

What if we assume poems are comprised of interactions (that in a sense an aspect of their composition, as far as we know, takes place outside the poems as well as inside) and that these may interact with each other, and that these interactions are (or are like) characters who may observe, speak, sleep, desert each other, change from animate to inanimate?  This workshop will apply these assumptions to the discussion of the participants’ work and to more general inquiry into the nature and practice of the art.  Prompts designed to suggest ways of enacting the possibilities suggested by the interactive model will be provided.

• Meets: 10:00 a.m.—4:30 PM, Saturday, April 26, 2014
• Cost: $95 (one-day session, with lunch break)
• Location: Mountain Writers Series offices, 2804 SE 27th Avenue, Portland OR
• Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 5 participants

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). Additionally, his poems, translations, and essays have been frequently and widely published in anthologies and journals, including Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Denver Quarterly, Field, Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, Iowa Review and The Southern Review.  He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts.  His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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Peter Sears 
Poetry Writing Workshop

This eight-week poetry-writing workshop requires students to apply in advance. The class is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. A deposit will secure your space in this limited-enrollment workshop. Priority enrollment will be given to poets who have attended prior writing workshops with Peter Sears.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Thursday, April 3 - May 22, 2014
• Cost:  $325 [Eight three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9
• Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Peter Sears is the author of three full-length poetry collections -- Tour: New and Selected Poems, The Brink, andGreen Diver, as well as a number of poetry chapbooks and books on teaching writing, including Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Peter Sears has taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College, community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, and director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. His work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers such as Saturday Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone, as well as in such literary magazines as Field, New Letters, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. He currently teaches in the Pacific University low-residency MFA department, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland, Oregon.

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Cindy Stewart-Rinier
Strategies for Revision: A Poetry Workshop

We’ve all written poems that feel adequate, but are missing a quality that pushes them beyond that. This workshop is for poets who would like to explore strategies to help bring those poems to fuller realization. In Gregory Orr’s essay, “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry," he posits that each poet is born with a particular gift for story, structure, music or imagination. Great poems, he asserts, contain a balance of these. In this six-week, interactive workshop, we will begin each session by reading established poets to identify how story, structure, music and imagination function in their poems. The last two and a half hours will be dedicated to reading and discussing one another’s work with an eye to identifying and building on each poet’s strengths or “particular gifts.”

• Meets:  6:00-9:00 PM, Wednesdays, April 2, 9, 23, 30 & May 7 & 14 , 2014
  Note: April 16 -- Mountain Writers Series reading at The Press Club
• Cost:  $240 (six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 10
• Location: Mountain Writers Series offices  2804 SE 27th, Portland OR 

Cindy Stewart-Rinier’s poems have appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review, Ascent, and VoiceCatcher, among others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University in 2012. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected for the Crab Creek Review 2011 Editor’s Prize, and awarded first place in the Portland Pen Women Poetry Contest. She has taught creative writing at all levels, from elementary and middle school to adult students. Currently she is serving as a Guest Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher Journal, and is a board member of the Mountain Writers Series. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

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John Brehm 
Reading-as-a-Writer: Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, 
and the Poetics of Intimacy

New York School poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler created in their poems a new kind of intimacy between writer and reader. Far from the the weighty self-dramatizing of confessional poets like Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, their work is witty, spontaneous, playful, confiding, and filled with candid details from their personal lives and friendships. In this eight-week reading-as-a-writer course, we’ll read a broad selection of poems by O’Hara and Schuyler with an eye toward how their poetry might open up new possibilities in our own writing. Six of our classes will be focused on discussing O’Hara and Schuyler; the other two sessions—the fourth and final classes—will be devoted to poems that you’ll write in response to our readings. 

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, March 11 - May 6, 2014 [No workshop Tuesday, April 15]  
• Cost: $325 (8 three-hour sessions)
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Minimum 5, maximum 12 participants.

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland.

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Judith Barrington 
Landscape & Memory

• Meets: 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM, April 5, 12, 19 & 26, 2014 (four Saturdays) 
• Cost:  $300 [Four four-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 15

Judith Barrington has published three books of poetry, most recently Horses and the Human Soul, and two chapbooks including Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands(winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). She recently won the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize and gave a reading in Cork (Ireland). Her best-selling text, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is widely used by universities and writing groups in the U.S., Germany, and Australia. She has served as a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, MFA Program, and teaches workshops across the USA and in the UK and Spain.

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John Brehm 
Writing the Expansive Poem

We are typically encouraged to compress and condense, to make our poems tight and crisp. Sound advice! But what about the opposite and complementary impulse: toward extravagance, hyperbole, too-muchness—the road of excess which Blake says leads to the palace of wisdom? In this six-week poetry workshop, you’ll be encouraged to let your poems run away with you, to expand, stretch out, pile it on, and learn how to test your limits without testing your reader’s patience. Weekly assignments will emerge from our reading of poems by Andrew Marvell, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Anne Waldman, Barbara Hamby, and others. 

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, January 14 – March 4, 2014      
• Cost: $325 (8 three-hour sessions)
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Minimum 5, maximum 10 participants.
• Register now!

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland.

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Peter Sears 
Poetry Writing Workshop

This five-week poetry-writing workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. Priority enrollment will be given until December 15, 2013 to poets who have attended prior writing workshops with Peter Sears.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, alternate Thursdays
• Dates: January 16 & 30; February 13 [no class Feb. 27]; March 13 & 27. 2014
• Cost:  $225 [Five three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9
• Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Peter Sears is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including Tour: New and Selected Poems, The Brink, and Green Diver, as well as a number of chapbooks. His books on teaching writing include Secret Writing and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Peter Sears has taught at Reed College and the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA program; he also served as Dean of Students at Bard College, the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, and the founder/director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. His work has appeared in such national magazines and newspapers as Saturday Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone, as well as in numerous literary magazines, among them Field, New Letters, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. He splits his time between Corvallis and Portland.

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Kathleen Halme 
The Serious Pleasure of Poetry

 The goal of this workshop is to reveal many sides of you as a writer, to prepare the intuition for the possible. In this community of writers we will play with the multidimensional language of poetry, the heartbeat of the poem, the long tradition of poetry as fiction, and how to organize a poem. Bountiful options for in-class and at-home exercises will be provided. Writers at all levels are welcome. Texts for the course include handouts of representative published poems and the work generated by the class. Please bring ten copies of a “stuck” poem—any subject or style—to the first meeting.

• Meets: Tuesdays, 6:00 - 9:00 PM, March 11 - April 29, 2014      
• Cost: $325 (8 three-hour sessions)
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Minimum 5, maximum 10 participants.

Kathleen Halme's honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in anthropology, and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review and Anthropological Quarterly. Her three books of poetry are Every Substance Clothed, winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series and the Balcones Poetry Prize; Equipoise, published by Sarabande Books; and Drift and Pulse from Carnegie Mellon University Press. 

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Tom Crawford
Voice: Finding the Magic

Voice: Finding the Magic. You don’t have to be an art historian to know that Modigliani pulled off something special in his paintings. There’s a whole vocabulary to exploring what makes his art unique – the mystery, and it is the mystery, that haunts us and keeps us coming back. And this would be true of the work of any genuine artist. What I know about serious writers is, with enough commitment and some guidance, they can discover what’s unique about their poetry. It’s my job as a teacher to point them in that direction. That’s what I’ve been doing for forty years: writing poetry, teaching the writing of poetry, turning lines over and over, and looking to discover the magic. The class will be limited to 10 serious students. Please submit 3 poems (subject line: Crawford workshop) no longer than a page each, to pdxmws@mountainwriters.org

• Date: Oct. 19, Nov. 2 & Nov. 16, 2013 (three Saturdays)
• Time: 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM, with a one-hour lunch
• Cost:  $225 [Three four-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 10
• Location: chez Anne Hughes, SE 26th & Taggart [we will send directions]

Tom Crawford is a teacher and poet whose work explores the natural world and our complex connection to it. Born in Michigan and educated in California, he’s lived much of his life in the Northwest. Years of teaching in China and South Korea have infused his work with a quality of Eastern sensibility. His poems are both contemplative and activist. They’re not just about beauty but how to save it. Crawford is the author of seven books of poetry. Lauds won the Oregon Book Award. The Temple On Monday was winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. His recent collection, The Names of Birds, was “Star-reviewed” in BookList. He’s the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and two fellowships from the National Endowments for the Arts. He now makes his home in Santa Fe, NM, but this fall will be Writer in Residence at Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology on the Oregon Coast.

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Cindy Stewart-Rinier
Strategies for Revision: A Poetry Workshop

We’ve all written poems that feel adequate, but are missing a quality that pushes them beyond that. This workshop is for poets who would like to explore strategies to help bring those poems to fuller realization. In Gregory Orr’s essay, “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry”, he posits that each poet is born with a particular gift for story, structure, music or imagination. Great poems, he asserts, contain a balance of these. In this six-week, interactive workshop, we will begin each session by reading established poets to identify how story, structure, music and imagination function in their poems. The last two and a half hours will be dedicated to reading and discussing one another’s work with an eye to identifying and building on each poet’s strengths or “particular gifts.”

• Meets:  6:00-9:00 PM, Tuesdays, November 5 - December 10, 2013
• Cost:  $240 (six three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 10
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 

Cindy Stewart-Rinier’s poems have appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review, Ascent, and VoiceCatcher, among others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University in 2012. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected for the Crab Creek Review 2011 Editor’s Prize, and awarded first place in the Portland Pen Women Poetry Contest. She has taught creative writing at all levels, from elementary and middle school to adult students. Currently she is serving as a Guest Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher Journal, and is a board member of the Mountain Writers Series. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

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Nance Van Winckel
Prose Poems & Flash Fictions

In this cross-genre workshop we'll look at these two kindred but distinct forms. Where do they cross and fuel one another? What puts the "poetry" in the prose, the "flash" in the fiction? Registered participants will receive illustrative examples and an essay that examines similarities and differences of each. Then, in our workshop, we will look closely at participants' contributions in these genres, assessing poetic and narrative strengths and potentials.

• Meets: Saturday, November 23, 10:00 a.m.—4:30 PM (one-hour lunch).
• Cost: $100 (one-day session)
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland
• Enrollment: Maximum 12/minimum 5 participants
• Register now!

Nance Van Winckel’s sixth collection of poems, Pacific Walkers, is just out from U. of Washington Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships, the Washington Sate Governor's Award for Poetry, and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review. Her fourth collection of linked stories and flash fiction, Boneland (U. of Oklahoma Press, July 2013), won a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. Her flash fictions, short-shorts, and full-length stories have been published in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, Kenyon Review, and other journals. Her hybrid mash-ups of poetry and photography have been in several gallery shows and literary journals. She is Professor Emerita in Eastern Washington University's graduate creative writing program, as well as a faculty member of Vermont College of Fine Arts' low-residency MFA program. She has taught at Bucknell U., Randolph College, U. of Montana, Centrum, and other schools. She lives near Spokane, Washington with her husband, the artist Rik Nelson.

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Judith Barrington 
Poems: All Shapes & Sizes

This poetry workshop held over three Saturdays, will allow you time to experiment with new poems between meetings. All poems have a form, and the traditional ones have endured for good reasons: they may well be a starting point from which you can launch your own versions. It’s hard to imagine a painter or musician, say, who hasn’t studied the basic elements of his or her chosen art; poets, too, need an understanding of our inheritance as well as an innovative ability to find the lines and stanzas that will best serve the subject in this time. We’ll do our best to combine the tried and true with the unique and modern.

• Meets: 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM, Oct. 12, Oct. 26 & Nov. 9, 2013 (three Saturdays) 
• Cost:  $225 [Three four-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 15
• Location: Room 23,  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland, OR
• Register now!

Judith Barrington has published three books of poetry, most recently Horses and the Human Soul, and two chapbooks including Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). She recently won the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize and gave a reading in Cork (Ireland). Her best-selling text, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is widely used by universities and writing groups in the U.S., Germany, and Australia. She has served as a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, MFA Program, and teaches workshops across the USA and in the UK and Spain.

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Andrea Hollander
The Lyric Essay: A Writing Workshop

The lyric essay – what innovator John D’Agata calls an oddball genre—combines elements of both poetry and essays, relying on the former in its insistence on compression, form, and the sound and texture of language, and on the latter in its devotion to the process of discovery based on fact. In this workshop we will attempt to define the genre for ourselves by not only by reading what others have to say about the craft of nonfiction writing and by examining exemplary essays by established and emerging writers, but also by creating our own essays, sometimes modeled on the work of others and at other times experimenting with our own gestures and forms.

• Meets:  6:00-9:00 PM, Tuesdays, September 10 - October 29 , 2013
• Cost:  $325 (Eight three-hour sessions)
• Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 10
• Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR 
• Register now!

An award-winning poet and essayist, Andrea Hollander (formerly Andrea Hollander Budy) is author of four full-length poetry collections—most recently, Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012 (Autumn House Press, 2013). She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009). Her awards include a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. For twenty-two years Hollander has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

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Peter Sears
Poetry Writing Workshop

This eight-week poetry-writing workshop requires students to apply in advance. The class is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each session. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. A deposit will secure your space in this limited-enrollment workshop. To apply, send an email to pdxmws@mountainwriters.org with "Sears' Workshop Fall 2013" in the subject line and 3 pages of poetry. Priority enrollment will be given to poets who have attended prior writing workshops with Peter Sears.

• Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 PM, Thursday, September 26 - November 14, 2013
• Cost:  $325 [Eight three-hour sessions]
• Enrollment:  Maximum 9
• Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Peter Sears is the author of three full-length poetry collections -- Tour: New and Selected Poems, The Brink, and Green Diver, as well as a number of poetry chapbooks and books on teaching writing, including Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Peter Sears has taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College, community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, and director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. His work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers such as Saturday Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone, as well as in such literary magazines as Field, New Letters, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. He currently teaches in the Pacific University low-residency MFA department, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland, Oregon.

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Joseph Millar

Image and Narrative - A Poetry Writing Workshop

In this generative workshop we will look closely at these two elements of the poem and consider their separate potentials and functions, the ways by which they augment each other, in our own work and the work of others.  We'll look at a page from Pound's critical writing and use poems by Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Theodore Roethke and Philip Levine as models for exercises. Bring a notebook and be ready to write. 

Meets:  Saturday, July 20, 2013  - 10:00 AM - 4:30 PM (one-hour lunch)

Workshop Fee :  $95

Enrollment:  Maximum 12/minimum 5 participants

Location: Room 12, Multnomah Friends Meeting House, 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR

Joseph Millar is the author of three books of poetry: Blue Rust(Carnegie Mellon, 2012); Overtime (2001), a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; and Fortune (2007). Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University. He spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a 2008 Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in DoubleTAke, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program and lives in North Carolina with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.

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Leanne Grabel 
Why Not! Turning Your Life into Performance
A Spokenword/Performance Workshop for Teens

There is nothing more liberating than spilling your guts to a beat. You can actually dance to your life. And it's way better than wearing it heavy on your shoulders like a rock. In my new workshop for teen-agers, WHY NOT? Turning Your Life Into Performance, we will write and then sculpt our personal stories into spoken-word pieces, creating a polished piece ready to perform. We will review poetry vocabulary and storytelling techniques, watch clips of fabulous performance pieces, generate lists of topics to explore. Then we will write. Editing, revising and rehearsing will be done individually and in groups. One ENTIRE class – if not two – will be devoted to editing, revising and rehearsing. Corresponding images (Powerpoint? Video? Photography? Paintings?) and music/beats will be added. The class will end with an informal performance for friends and family.

Meets: Saturdays, 10:00 a.m.—12:00 PM, July 6, 13, 20 & 27, 2013

Cost: $150 (Four sessions)

Location: TaborSpace Classroom, 5441 SE Belmont, Portland OR 97215

Enrollment: ages 12-18 (other ages negotiable). Minimum 5, maximum 12 participants

Leanne Grabel is a Language Arts and Special Education teacher for Portland Public Schools, working with children in treatment. She is also a poet and mother. She and her husband Steve Sander created and ran Cafe Lena. Grabel's performance pieces include "The Circus of Anguish and Mirth," "The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression," and "Anger: The Musical." Grabel's books include Short Poems by a Short Person, Lonesome and Very Quarrelsome Heroes, Flirtations, Badgirls, and Brontosaurus: A Memoir. Grabel has been teaching writing for nearly forty years.

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Christopher Howell

Workshop: Narrative as Ghostly Presence 

In this intensive workshop we will snub Aristotle by considering narrative not as a sequence of related events with a beginning, middle, and end, but as tonal, referential, imagistic, or thematic threads that contribute to our sense of a poem’s unitary result.  We will explore the ways in which “narrative” and “story” can be quite different modes of exploration, and how the poet may navigate between and around them.  Prompts and a reading list will be provided for further practice and study.

Meets: Saturday, June 22, 10:00 a.m.—4:30 PM (one-hour lunch).
Cost: $95 (one-day session)
Location:Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland
Enrollment:Maximum 10/minimum 5 participants

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). Additionally, his poems, translations, and essays have been frequently and widely published in anthologies and journals, including Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Denver Quarterly, Field, Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, Iowa Review and The Southern Review.  He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts.  His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

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John Brehm
Free Verse Forms - A Poetry Writing Workshop

For poets writing in traditional forms, many decisions have been made in advance. For free verse poets, the field is wide open. But too often poets writing in free verse exhibit little formal variety or invention. In this class we’ll explore a range of formal options for poems you’ve already written and experiment with new free verse forms of your own devising. We’ll cultivate a heightened awareness of formal textures and the subtle interplay between shape, sound, pacing, rhythm, tone and content. Stanzas or no stanzas? Long lines or short? Enjambed or end-stopped? Fast or slow? Smooth or jagged? We’ll explore these and many other options as we read each other’s work alongside notable free verse examples from established poets.

Meets: 7:00 - 10:00 PM, May 7 - May 28, 2013

Cost:  $225 [Four three-hour sessions]

Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 12

Location: Room 23, Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland OR

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland.

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Andrea Hollander
The Poem as a Journey: A Writing Workshop

A good poem takes the reader on a journey whose destination is unpredictable yet satisfyingly inevitable. Such a journey may feel physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or some combination of these. Ineffective poems fail to take the reader anywhere—they begin and end in the same place. Or they exist entirely in the mind of the poet or speaker. Nor is the best path the straightest (think interstate highway versus scenic drive). In this workshop, we will examine a series of masterful poems in order to discover techniques we can employ in our own work, and we will examine participants’ in-progress poems with an eye toward enriching the journey. There will be opportunities for in-class writing and revising.

Meets:  6:00-9:00 PM, Tuesdays, June 4 - July 23, 2013
Cost:  $325 (Eight three-hour sessions)
Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 10
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House 

Andrea Hollander’s fourth full-length collection is Landscape with Female Figure (Autumn House Press, 2013). She is also the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009) and three chapbooks. She is winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. For twenty-two years Hollander has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Link to Workshop Flyer

Judith Barrington 
Writing the Body

This workshop will focus on letting your stories or poems emerge through physical experiences. You may want to write directly about the body—its pleasures, its brokenness, its limitations or its particular ways of knowing. Or you may choose to recall experiences that you’ve never looked at from the point of view of your feet or your navel—stories that you never thought of as being about the body, but that will now be filtered through it. We’ll look at both poetry and prose by writers who have attempted this and try out for ourselves, some new perspectives. As time permits the instructor and the group will give feedback from your work in progress.

Meets: 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM, April 20, April 27 & May 11, 2013 (three Saturdays)

Cost:  $225 [Three four-hour sessions]

Enrollment:  Minimum 5, maximum 15

Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland [street parking available] 

Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir won the 2000 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She has also published three books of poetry, most recently Horses and the Human Soul. Recent work includes two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). Her best-selling text, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is widely used by universities and writing groups in the U.S., Germany, and Australia. She is a faculty member of the Univ. of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program, where she teaches memoir.

Link to Workshop Flyer

Cindy Stewart-Rinier

Always Beginning: A Poetry Writing Workshop

Poets, if you’re finding it hard to be inspired to write or miss the company of fellow poets, join us Monday evenings at TaborSpace for two hours dedicated to discussing poetry and sharing work. I’ll provide a model poem and prompt before each session, and we’ll spend the first half hour of each workshop focusing on a particular aspect of craft. We’ll then devote the rest of the workshop to a discussion of participants’ poems. Close reading will be the primary tool for learning various aspects of craft, so its practice will be emphasized in all aspects of the workshop, from discussion of suggested poems to response to one another’s work. Within this supportive setting, students can expect to be respectfully challenged to grow as readers and as writers. This workshop is for the beginning poet as well as for the more experienced writer who knows the value of revisiting the fundamentals. All levels are welcome. 

Meets:  7:00-9:00 PM, Mondays, April 1 – May 20, 2013

Cost:  $185 [Eight two-hour sessions.]

Location: Classroom at  TaborSpace  (map), 5441 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR 97215

Cindy Stewart-Rinier’s poems have appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review and Ascent, among others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University in 2012. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected for the Crab Creek Review 2011 Editor’s Prize, and was awarded first place in the Portland Pen Women Poetry Contest. She has taught creative writing at all levels, from  elementary and middle school to adult students. A board member of the Mountain Writers Series, she lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Link to Workshop Flyer

Peter Sears
Poetry Writing Workshop

This eight-week poetry-writing workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each class. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. A deposit will secure your space in this limited-enrollment workshop.

Meets:  6:30 - 9:30 p.m., Thursdays, April 4 - May 23, 2013

Cost:  $325 [Eight three-hour sessions]

Enrollment:  Maximum 9

Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland [street parking available]

Peter Sears is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Tour: New and Selected Poems, The Brink, and Green Diver; a number of poetry chapbooks; and books on teaching writing, including Secret Writing and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Peter Sears has taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College, community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, and director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. His work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers such as Saturday Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone, as well as in such literary magazines as Field, New Letters, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. He currently teaches in the Pacific University low-residency MFA department, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland, Oregon.

Link to Workshop Flyer

Cindy Stewart-Rinier

Always Beginning: A Poetry Writing Workshop

Poets, if you’re finding it hard to find inspiration to write, or miss the company of fellow poets, join us Tuesday evenings for two hours dedicated to discussing poetry and sharing work. Before each session, a model poem and prompt will be offered. Participants will read and, as often as possible, listen to audio of poems that provide the basis for discussing particular elements of craft. Close reading will be the primary tool for learning various aspects of craft, so its practice will be emphasized in all aspects of the workshop, from discussion of suggested poems to response to one another’s work. Within this supportive setting, students can expect to be respectfully challenged to grow as readers and consequently, as writers. This workshop is for the beginning poet as well as for the more experienced writer who knows the value of revisiting the fundamentals. All levels are welcome.  Cost is $15 per session  or $100 for those who sign up for the full eight weeks.

Please email your poem for discussion to cksr@teleport.com by 5 p.m. the Sunday before the workshop meets; indicate “Tuesday workshop” in the subject line of your email and include your full name and email address on the poem itself. [Per-session participants should pay online through Paypal at www.mountainwriters.org or bring a check payable Mountain Writers Series to the workshop session.]

Meets:  7:00-9:00 PM, Tuesdays, January 15 – March 5, 2013

Cost:  $15 per session or $100 for the full eight weeks.

Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House  (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland [street parking available]

Register now!

Cindy Stewart-Rinier’s poems have appeared in Calyx, The Smoking Poet, Crab Creek Review and Ascent, among others. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University in 2012. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected for the Crab Creek Review 2011 Editor’s Prize, and was awarded first place in the Portland Pen Women Poetry Contest. She has taught creative writing at all levels, from  elementary and middle school to adult students. A board member of the Mountain Writers Series, she lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Link to Workshop Flyer

Kathleen Halme
Poetry By The Book

The inspiration for this poetry workshop will be the deep reading of four recent poetry collections chosen for their diversity of style and subject. The class will provide many opportunities for trying out new moves and expanding poetic range.  Poets at all levels of experience are welcome to join this course in poetic experimentation. The course will stress poetry as practice, vision, and revision; each writer will receive frequent feedback on work-in-progress from the instructor and the group.

Texts, available at Broadway Books, are Curses and Wishes by Carl Adamshick, Help is on the Way by John Brehm, Space in Chains by Laura Kasischke, and One With Others by C.D. Wright.

Meets:  6:00-8:00 PM, Tuesdays, January 15 – February 25, 2013
Cost:  $275 (Eight sessions two-hour sessions)
Enrollment:  Minimum 8, Maximum 10
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House  (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Kathleen Halme's honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in anthropology, and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review and Anthropological Quarterly. Her three books of poetry are Every Substance Clothed, winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series and the Balcones Poetry Prize; Equipoise, published by Sarabande Books; and Drift and Pulse from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She lives in Portland.

Link to Workshop Flyer

Andrea Hollander Budy

Dead on the Page? Approaches to Revision, 
Transformation, and Regeneration

So you've drafted a poem. Now what? In this workshop intended for practicing poets at any level of commitment, we will examine poems-in-progress that seem not yet to have found their final form -- poems that don't feel appropriately resolved or that seem to have defied or eluded rewriting -- in order to rethink/re-see/re-envision a possible path to a more finished and powerful version. Rather than critiquing these unfinished poems, we will experiment with a variety of revising techniques and sometimes radical editing strategies, some of which may lead to new writing. In addition to delving into participants' work, we will also look at ways other poets have handled this often-tricky revision process. Participants will be asked to submit two poems-in-progress in advance of the workshop.

Cost:  $90 (one session)
Meets:  10:00 AM - 4:30 pm, Saturday, November 10, 2012
Enrollment:  Minimum 6, Maximum 10.
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House  (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Andrea Hollander Budy is the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009) and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Woman in the Painting ((Autumn House Press, 2006), The Other Life (Story Line Press, 2001), and House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Among other honors are the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. A relatively new resident of Portland, she has worked for the past twenty-one years as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. 

Link to Workshop Flyer

Christopher Howell

How Do We Begin, and Where Do We End?

Poetry Writing Workshop

How do we begin and where do we end?  We will focus much of our discussion on two matters crucial to a poem’s total effect:  how it opens (or may be opened) and how we determine that it has ended (or may be closed).  Because these two movements (or moments) are common to all poetry and all levels, the class should be appropriate for both advanced and beginning writers.  Students should come to class with ten copies of at least two of their own poems, plus one copy of a favorite poem that they feel demonstrates effective opening and closure.

Meets: Saturday, October 20, 10:00 AM - 4:30 PM (one-hour lunch).
Cost: $95 (one-day session)
Enrollment: Maximum 10/minimum 5 participants
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). Additionally, his poems, translations, and essays have been frequently and widely published in anthologies and journals, including Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Denver Quarterly, Field, Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, Iowa Review and The Southern Review.  He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the King Country Arts Commission, the Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts.  His work has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes, and has twice received the Washington State Book Award.  He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers, in Spokane, where he is also director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.

Link to Workshop flyer

Kathleen Halme
Forms of Flight, Modes of Mind

Poets at all levels of experience are welcome to join this course in poetic form. We will experiment with a broad range of poetic modes and forms, past and present, in order to expand imaginative possibilities and generate new poems. Have you ever written narrative poetry, come under the spell of litany, or composed a moving elegry? The class will stress poetry as practice, vision and revision; each writer will receive frequent helpful feedback on work in progress from the class and instructor.

Cost:  $275 (Eight sessions two-hour sessions)
Meets:  6:00-8:00 PM, Mondays, September 24 – November 12, 2012
Enrollment:  Minimum 8, Maximum 10.
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House  (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Kathleen Halme's honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in anthropology, and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review and Anthropological Quarterly. Her three books of poetry are Every Substance Clothed, winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series and the Balcones Poetry Prize; Equipoise, published by Sarabande Books; and Drift and Pulse from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She lives in Portland.

Link to Workshop Flyer

Lidia Yuknavitch

The Voice is a Muscle

Developing "voice" in fiction and nonfiction both is a tricky business. If it is your own voice, how to manage the tone and affect and what forms to bring to your story in order to get the truths to resonate takes practice. If it is a character's voice, what forms and strategies are available for making that voice distinct, vivid, and powerful enough to carry part of the story? In this workshop we will tease out the wide varieties of voice strategies available to prose writers and practice the fine art of building voices that no one can forget. In the process we will develop a series of metaphors that match the voices you call forth in your writing. You will go home hearing voices in the best of ways.

Cost: $150 [Four two-hour sessions]
Meets: 6:30 - 8:30 p.m., four Tuesdays, September 4, 11, 18 & 25, 2012: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Minimum 6.
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Lidia Yuknavitch, this year’s winner of the Reader’s Choice Award from Literary Arts, Inc., is the author of the memoir, The Chronology of Water, winner of an award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and a forthcoming novel, Dora: A Head Case, both from Hawthorne Books. She has three previous collections of short stories, Her Other Mouths, Liberty's Excess, and Real to Reel. Her stories and creative nonfiction appear widely in literary journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of awards from Literary Arts, Poets and Writers, and the Oregon Arts Council. She teaches writing, literature and women's studies at Mt. Hood Community College; she lives in Portland with her writer/filmmaker husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. Her other love, is water.

Link to Yuknavitch Workshop Flyer

Peter Sears

Poetry Writing Workshop

This eight-week poetry-writing workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each class. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. A deposit will secure your space in this limited-enrollment workshop.

Cost: $290 [Eight three-hour sessions]
Meets: 6:30 - 9:30 p.m., Thursdays, September 20 - November 8, 2012
Enrollment: Maximum 9 -- enrollment closed
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Peter Sears is the author of three full-length poetry collections -- Tour: New and Selected Poems, The Brink, and Green Diver, a number of poetry chapbooks, and books on teaching writing, including Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Peter Sears has taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College, community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, and director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. His work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers such as Saturday Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone, as well as in such literary magazines as Field, New Letters, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. He currently teaches in the Pacific University low-residency MFA department, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland, Oregon.

Gina Ochsner

Three-dimensional Characters

Deserve Three-Dimensional Conflicts

Animating the Three-Dimensional Character in Fiction. If we believe that the characters in our fictions should be as lively, complicated, conflicted and, well, as interesting as we ourselves are, then why is it so hard to pull it off?  We’ve all heard that our characters need to be much more than cardboard cutouts to be manipulated across our fictive stage.  But how do we breathe life into a character who seems to resist our best efforts?  How do we transform two-dimensional characters into fully fleshed three-dimensional characters?  How do we do all this and convince the reader that this person we’ve created merits this kind of attention?   This workshop aims to answer those questions (and so many more, I hope) with practical hands-on examples, analysis, suggestions and exercises that probe the three arcs of conflict that every main character must possess. 

Cost: $110 [Three two-hour sessions]
Meets: 7:00 - 9:00 p.m., three Thursdays, September 6, 13, & 20, 2012: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Minimum 6; maximum 12.
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Gina Ochsner has received awards from the John L. Simon Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment of Arts. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. She is the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books received the Oregon Book Award. Her latest work, a novel, is The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, 2009). Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program.

Link to Ochsner Workshop Flyer

John Brehm

The Empathic Imagination:
Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda
Reading as a Writer Workshop

Few poets have as much to teach us as Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. And not just about poetry but about life itself. In this Reading as a Writer course, we'll focus on the power of their poems to both express and arouse empathy and compassion. Can we cultivate such warmth and open-heartedness in our own writing? This course offers participants an opportunity to explore that question through reading and discussing representative poems as well as relevant passages from Whitman's journals and Neruda's Memoirs. Our texts will be The Portable Walt Whitman (invaluable for the biographical material it contains in addition to the poetry) and Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Though our main focus will be on discussing Whitman and Neruda’s poems, participants will be asked to write at least one poem in response to our readings. Our final class will be devoted to student poems. 

Cost: $220 [Six two-hour sessions]
Meets: Tuesdays, 7:00 - 9:00 PM, Sept. 11 - Oct. 16, 2012: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.    

John Brehm is the author of two books of  poetry: Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize, and Help Is on the Way, which won the 2012 Four Lakes Prize, both from the University of Wisconsin Press. Brehm has published a chapbook, The Way Water Moves, from Flume Press (2002) and was the associate editor for The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Best American Poetry 1999. He has taught at Cornell, Emerson College, and Portland State University and received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Yaddo. From 1996-2008 he lived in Brooklyn, working as a freelance writer and as a senior copywriter at Oxford University Press. He currently lives in Portland.

Link to Brehm Workshop Flyer

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Scott Nadelson

Creating the Mysterious Being:
Character Complexity

To quote Jim Morrison, people are strange. In this one-session workshop we’ll focus on that strangeness, the ways in which characters who are most alive become more mysterious the more fully we know them. In particular we will discuss strategies for efficiently developing distinct, engaging characters who come to life through gesture, dialogue, perception, and thought, and often through the contradictions illuminated by these different methods of development. Participants will submit 4-5 pages of prose -- preferably the opening pages of a longer story or novel -- which we will examine with an eye toward deepening our experience of the characters.

Cost: $90 [One day-long session]
Meets: 9:30 - 4:30 p.m., Saturday, September 22, 2012 (one-hour lunch): ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Minimum 6; maximum 12.

Scott Nadelson is author of three story collections: Aftermath (Hawthorne Books, 2011); The Cantor’s Daughter, winner of the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize; and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.

Nadelson is a gifted storyteller whose award-winning 2004 debut, Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, mined similar terrain. He is adept at peeling away the superfluous layers and getting down to the unpleasant intricacies that are a part of our everyday relationships, be they parental, familial, marital, fraternal, or casual…These beautifully crafted stories are populated by Jewish suburbanites living in New Jersey, but ethnicity doesn’t play too large a role here. Rather, it is the humanity of the characters and our empathy for them that binds us to their plights.— The Austin Chronicle

Nadelson teaches creative writing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Carlos Reyes

Poetry Writing Workshop

Evidence of Our Existence: Come prepared to be engaged in poetry writing in this relaxed, enjoyable and inclusive all-day workshop. The poems of Brendan Behan, Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin, Rita Dove, John Haislip, Galway Kinnell, Sandra McPherson, Veronica Patterson and Carl Sandburg will serve as springboards for writing in class on a variety of subjects – what's in a name; courtship & marriage; ending relationships; death; and evidence of our existence. Workshop participants will benefit from critiques by a poet who has over thirty years of experience as a workshop leader and who will provide useful handouts and bibliographies. Participants should submit two poems-in-progress in advance of the workshop.

Cost: $90 [One day-long session]
Meets: 9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m., Saturday, June 30, 2012: ENROLLMENT CLOSED
Enrollment: Minimum 6; maximum 12.
Location: TaborSpace (link) , 5441 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR 97215

Carlos Reyes is a noted poet, writer and translator. Among his books of poems arePomegranate, Sister of the Heart (2012); The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems(2009); At the Edge of the Western Wave (2004); A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995), a Bluestem Prize winner and finalist for 1996 Oregon Book Awards; and The Shingle Weaver’s Journal (1980). Books of translations include The Sign of the Crow by Mexican poet, Ignacio Ruiz-Perez (2011); Poemas de la Isla/Island Poems by Josefina de la Torre (2000); and the Obra poética completa (Complete Poetic Works) of the preeminent Ecuadorean poet Jorge Carrera Andrade, published in 2004 in a bilingual edition in Ecuador. He is the publisher/editor of Trask House Books, Inc. In 2007 he was awarded a Heinrich Boll Fellowship to write on Achill Island, Ireland and in 2008 was awarded the Ethel Fortnter Award from St Andrews College. In 2009 he was poet-in-residence at the Joshua Tree National Park, and in April, 2011 he was writer-in-residence at The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska.  Reyes lives in Portland, but travels often to Ireland, last year visited India, and is a frequent visitor to Spain and Ecuador.

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Paulann Petersen

Downstream: Writing with the Current

Join Paulann Petersen in a writing workshop dedicated to creation of new work. Using notable poems as springboards, we'll turn ourselves loose in the river of words, letting language carry us along in its current, generating considerable new work as we go. The goal is to have each participant leave the workshop with an outpouring of new material ready to be fashioned into poems. All levels of experience are welcome

Cost: $70 [One-day session with an hour break for lunch] 
Meets: 10 AM – 4:30 PM, Saturday, June 2, 2012  [Workshop took place in the past]
Enrollment: Limit 15 
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark , Portland 97215

 
Paulann Petersen is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Petersen’s poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She is the author of four full-length collections of poems, The Wild Awake (Confluence Press, 2002); Blood Silk (Quiet Lion Press, 2004); A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books, 2004); and most recently The Voluptuary (Lost Horse Press, 2010), as well as four chapbooks: Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, Fabrication, and The Hermaphrodite Flower. Her work has been selected for the web site Poetry Daily and For Poetry in Motion, which puts poems on buses and light rail cars in the Portland metropolitan area. The recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award, Paulann has taught a number of poetry workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Fishtrap, Oregon Writers' Workshop in Portland (Northwest College of Art, Portland Art Museum), Mountain Writers Series, Oregon State Poetry Association, The Creative Arts Community at Menucha, Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and the Lifelong Learning Institute at Chemeketa Community College. She serves on the board for Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January William Stafford Birthday Events.

Link to June Workshop Flyer

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Carl Adamshick

Poetry Writing Workshop
 

Poets at all levels of experience are welcome to join this where discussion will focus on what is and what is not needed in a poem and how to choose the right image for the right emotion. The class will stress poetry as practice, vision and revision. During each workshop session, participants will receive frequent, helpful feedback on work in progress from both the class and the instructor.

Cost:  $200 (six sessions)
Meets:  6 - 8 PM, Mondays, May 21 – June 25, 2012: ENROLLMENT CLOSED
Enrollment:  Minimum 8, Maximum 10.

Carl Adamshick, this year’s winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, was also selected as winner of the 2010 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his book-length collection of poems, Curses and Wishes  (Louisiana State University Press, 2011). Other recognition of his work includes an Oregon Literary Fellowship and inclusion in Poetry in Motion. His work has been published in Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Tin House and The Missouri Review. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Adamshick has resided in Portland for the past twenty years. During those years he has supported himself by working for a printer and teaching for regional and local writing organizations and at Catlin Gabel School. Adamshick is the William Stafford poet-in-residence at Lewis and Clark College and co-founder, with Mike McGriff, of Tavern Books.

Link to Workshop flyer

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Andrea Hollander Budy

Dead on the Page? Approaches to Revision,
Transformation, and Regeneration

So you've drafted a poem. Now what? In this workshop intended for practicing poets at any level of commitment, we will examine poems-in-progress that seem not yet to have found their final form -- poems that don't feel appropriately resolved or that seem to have defied or eluded rewriting -- in order to rethink/re-see/re-envision a possible path to a more finished and powerful version. Rather than critiquing these unfinished poems, we will experiment with a variety of revising techniques and sometimes radical editing strategies, some of which may lead to new writing. In addition to delving into participants' work, we will also look at ways other poets have handled this often-tricky revision process. Participants will be asked to submit two poems-in-progress in advance of the workshop.

Cost:  $90 (one session)
Meets:  10:00 AM - 4:30 pm, Saturday, May 12, 2012: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment:  Minimum 6, Maximum 10.
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House  (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

Andrea Hollander Budy is the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009) and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Woman in the Painting ((Autumn House Press, 2006), The Other Life (Story Line Press, 2001), and House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Among other honors are the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies, college textbooks and literary journals, and she has been featured at writers' conferences and festivals throughout the United States, as well as in England and France. A relatively new resident of Portland, she has worked for the past twenty-one years as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. 

Link to Workshop Flyer

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Paulann Petersen

Downstream: Writing with the Current

Join Paulann Petersen in a writing workshop dedicated to creation of new work.  Using notable poems as springboards, we'll turn ourselves loose in the river of words, letting language carry us along in its current, generating considerable new work as we go. The goal is to have each participant leave the workshop with an outpouring of new material ready to be fashioned into poems. All levels of experience are welcome. 

Cost: $70 [One-day session with an hour break for lunch] 
Meets: 10 AM – 4:30 PM, Saturday, March 24, 2012:  ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Limit 15 
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark , Portland 97215

 
Paulann Petersen is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Petersen’s poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She is the author of four full-length collections of poems, The Wild Awake (Confluence Press, 2002); Blood Silk (Quiet Lion Press, 2004); A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books, 2004); and most recently The Voluptuary (Lost Horse Press, 2010), as well as four chapbooks: Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, Fabrication, and The Hermaphrodite Flower. Her work has been selected for the web site Poetry Daily and For Poetry in Motion, which puts poems on buses and light rail cars in the Portland metropolitan area. The recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award, Paulann has taught a number of poetry workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Fishtrap, Oregon Writers' Workshop in Portland (Northwest College of Art, Portland Art Museum), Mountain Writers Series, Oregon State Poetry Association, The Creative Arts Community at Menucha, Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and the Lifelong Learning Institute at Chemeketa Community College. She serves on the board for Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January William Stafford Birthday Events.

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Carl Adamshick

Poetry Writing Workshop

Poets at all levels of experience are welcome to join this workshop. The class will stress poetry as practice, vision and revision; each writer will receive frequent, helpful feedback on work in progress from the class and instructor.

Cost:  $275 (eight sessions)
Meets:  6- 8 PM, Mondays, January 23 - March 12, 2012:  ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment:  Minimum 8, Maximum 10.
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House  (map), 4312 SE Stark, Portland

 

Carl Adamshick was selected as the winner of the 2010 Walt Whitman Award, one of the most prestigious first book prizes in the country – the recipient's first book is published and distributed to thousands of members of the Academy. The Award also includes a $5,000 cash prize and a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Carl Adamshick received the Award for his book-length collection of poems Curses and Wishes  (Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Adamshick did not follow the route taken by so many young poets who attend M.F.A or Ph.D. programs in creative writing. He supports himself by working for a printer in Portland, Oregon, where he has lived for the past twenty years, writing and playing an active role in a literary scene.

Adamshick lives in Portland, Oregon and is now teaching at Catlin Gabel, as well as for local writing organizations.

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William O'Daly

The Rose of Energy

Poetry, Translation, Metaphor and Truth

This combination seminar and workshop will explore poetic language, various aspects of metaphor and the intimate relationship between any poem and its incarnation in another language. Participants will be encouraged—as readers and appreciators, as well as writers—to explore and expand their horizons in poetry, to strengthen confidence in their unique sensibility and voice. We will read the poetry of Pablo Neruda by a variety of translators, write in response to a Neruda poem and enjoy activities that illuminate the connections among people of different cultures and backgrounds.

Cost:      $60 [one session] or $45 First Unitarian Pledging
Meets:    1-4 PM, Saturday, November 5, 2011
Enrollment: Minimum 5: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Location:  First Unitarian Church (map)  , 1011 SW 12th Avenue, Portland 

To register : Contact Katie Radditz, 503-228-6389, x17, kradditz@firstunitarianportland.org

Workshop facilitator William O’Daly is a poet, translator and fiction writer. His works include eight books he has translated of Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda published by Copper Canyon Press.

Please see announcement of performance of poetry and music, featuring William O'Daly presenting his translations of the poems of Pablo Neruda, with music by the world-renowned bassist Glen Moore.

An Evening of Neruda

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Judith Barrington

The Heart of the Story: Memoirist as Explorer

This workshop will focus on getting to the heart of your story. This is what Grace Paley called finding "the story under the story," and is the subject of Vivian Gornick's book, The Situation and the Story. It’s not enough simply to recount the events; when we write memoir we must struggle to dig deeper, to unearth the elusive truth that can emerge from the story. We must push ourselves, using retrospection, to find out what we might not yet know. Sometimes it takes getting a new perspective or a different angle on the tale to discover what can make a memoir truly memorable for both writer and reader. This workshop is designed to encourage that process. Participants should read ahead of time both Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art by Judith Barrington and The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick.

Cost:      $150 [Two four-hour sessions] 
Meets:   1-5 p.m., Two Sundays, October 9 & 16, 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment:  Minimum 6 
Location: 23 Sandy Gallery (map) , 623 NE 23rd, Portland

Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir won the 2000 Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She has also published three collections of poetry, most recently Horses and the Human Soul. Recent work includes two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). Her best-selling text, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, is widely used by universities and writing groups in the U.S., Germany, and Australia. She is a faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage’s MFA Program, where she teaches memoir.

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Peter Sears

Poetry Writing Workshop

This eight-week poetry-writing workshop is limited to nine people to ensure that each person can have a poem discussed during each class. Worksheets are prepared in each session for the following class. No beginners. No prompts. Revisions encouraged. A deposit will secure your space in this limited-enrollment workshop.

Cost:       $290 [Eight three-hour sessions] 
Meets:     6:30 - 9:30 p.m., Thursdays, Sept 29 - Nov. 17, 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Maximum 9                                                          
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark , Portland

Peter Sears is the author of three full-length poetry collections -- Tour: New and Selected Poems, The Brink, and Green Diver, a number of poetry chapbooks, and books on teaching writing, including Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Peter Sears has taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College, community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, and director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. His work has appeared in national magazines and newspapers such as Saturday Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone, as well as in such literary magazines as Field, New Letters, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. He currently teaches in the Pacific University low-residency MFA department, and splits his time between Corvallis and Portland, Oregon.

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Kathleen Halme

Poetry Writing Workshop

This is a workshop for beginning poets or for secret poets who want to learn more about poet techniques/craft. All that is required is a passion for reading and playing with poetry.  A helpful group of twelve poets will meet weekly to discuss assigned readings on various aspects of poetic craft such as form, rhythm, imagery, as well as offer feedback on class members' work-in-progress. Assignments will be given as a way to generate new work. Students will leave the class with a greater understanding of how to grow a poem, how to revise poems, and how to work within a community of writers. 

Cost:      $290 [Eight three-hour sessions] 
Meets:    6:00 - 9:00 p.m., Mondays, September 26 - November 14, 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark , Portland 

Kathleen Halme is the author of three books of poetry, Every Substance Clothed, which won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition and the 1995 Balcones Poetry Prize; Equipoise (Sarabande Books, 1998); and, most recently, Drift and Pulse (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2007). An earlier chapbook, The Everlasting Universe of Things, was selected as winner of the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition by Edward Hirsch. Kathleen Halme grew up in Wakefield, a post-mining town in Michigan's upper peninsula. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing Award. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship in anthropology. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

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Kevin Clark

I'm the One Who I'm Not:

Writing the Persona Poem

Write what you know, they always say. And so, since childhood, most of us have written poems that are about what we know best - i.e., the Wonder of Me. After a while, however, we may become a bit bored with the ever-present highway of our interior lives. Maybe a tree has fallen across the road and there’s no getting by. Maybe we don’t like writing about our experiences on Uncle Jake and Aunt June’s swan and mule farm, that home in which we grew up while our parents traveled the globe. Maybe we’ve always preferred the sound of someone else’s voice, anyone’s voice not our own?  What then? Writing persona poems about people we make up or people who actually exist (or once existed) can liberate us and juice up our imagination. This workshop will examine all kinds of methods and styles of engaging the first person voice of the Other. We'll finish up by drafting persona poems, too. 

Cost: $60 [One three-hour session]
Meets: 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Saturday, August 6, 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Minimum 5.
Location:  Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map)  4312 SE Stark, Portland 

Kevin Clark is the author of two volumes of poetry, Self-Portrait with Expletives, which won the Pleiades Press contest, and In the Evening of No Warning, which earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and collections, including The Georgia Review (and Keener Sounds, The Georgia Review's fortieth anniversary retrospective), The Antioch Review, College English, Gulf Coast , Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and The New York Quarterly. He teaches American literature and creative writing at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, and during the summers serves among the faculty for the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program, in Tacoma, Washington.

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Paulann Petersen

Downstream: Writing with the Current

Join Paulann Petersen in a writing workshop dedicated to creation of new work.  Using notable poems as springboards, we'll turn ourselves loose in the river of words, letting language carry us along in its current, generating considerable new work as we go. The goal is to have each participant leave the workshop with an outpouring of new material ready to be fashioned into poems. All levels of experience are welcome. 

Cost: $60 [One-day session with an hour break for lunch]
Meets: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., Saturday, June 11, 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Limit 15
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map) , 4312 SE Stark , Portland 97215

Paulann Petersen is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Petersen’s poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She is the author of four full-length collections of poems, The Wild Awake (Confluence Press, 2002); Blood Silk (Quiet Lion Press, 2004); A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books, 2004); and most recently The Voluptuary (Lost Horse Press, 2010), as well as four chapbooks: Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, Fabrication, and The Hermaphrodite Flower. Her work has been selected for the web site Poetry Daily and For Poetry in Motion, which puts poems on buses and light rail cars in the Portland metropolitan area. The recipient of Oregon Literary Arts' 2006 Holbrook Award, Paulann has taught a number of poetry workshops for colleges, libraries, and writers' conferences, including Fishtrap, Oregon Writers' Workshop in Portland (Northwest College of Art, Portland Art Museum), Mountain Writers Series, Oregon State Poetry Association, The Creative Arts Community at Menucha, Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and the Lifelong Learning Institute at Chemeketa Community College. She serves on the board for Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January William Stafford Birthday Events.

Martha Gies & Christine Bourdette

Writing an Artist's Statement

This can be a playful and creative process that yields a useful portrait, one that reflects your particular skills and goals and dreams. Portland author Martha Gies teams up with celebrated sculptor Christine Bourdette to lead artists in a series of exercises designed to assemble language that conveys your obsessions and processes in a fresh way.

Cost:      $60 [One morning session] 
Meets:   9 a.m. - 12 noon, Saturday, July 23, 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment:   Minimum 6 
Location: Multnomah Friends Meeting House (map)  4312 SE Stark, Portland 

Martha Gies is an Oregon author whose work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been published widely over the last three decades in newspapers, magazines and literary quarterlies, including Orion, The Sun, and Zyzzyva. Her book Up All Night, a portrait of Portland, Oregon, told through the stories of 23 people who work graveyard shift, was selected by both the Oregonian and the Statesman-Journal as one of the Ten Best Regional Books of 2004.

Christine Bourdette received her BA from Lewis & Clark College, Portland, in 1974. She has shown extensively nationally, including solo exhibitions at the Fairbanks Gallery at Oregon State University (Corvallis OR), The Tyler Museum of Art (Tyler TX), and The Wentz Gallery at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland OR). Her work was featured in three Oregon Biennials, and she has permanent public artworks in Portland, Seattle and many other locations.

Christopher Howell

Poetry Workshop

In this class poems will be discussed in terms of the ways in which Image and Voice, their character and use, may interact, exclude, and/or parallel each other. Take-home writing prompts will be provided so that students may study this interaction further on their own. All enrollees are encouraged to bring to class twelve copies each of two poems, one to share and one to workshop.  

Cost: $90 [One three-hour session] 
Meets: 1-4 p.m., Sunday, January 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Maximum 12 

Christopher Howell’s latest book is Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). His eighth collection of poems, Light’s Ladder, won the 2005 Washington State Book Award. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a number of anthologies and numerous journals. Among his awards are three Pushcart Prizes and two National Endowment fellowships.
He lives in Spokane, WA, where he teaches creative writing at Eastern Washington University.

Vern Rutsala

Master Class in Poetry with Vern Rutsala

Don't miss this opportunity to work with one of the finest poets in the country. Oregon Book Award winner and 2005 National Book Award finalist, Vern Rutsala will share his poetic insights and expertise in this intensive workshop that will help participants to generate new work and to critique existing work. For this workshop, participants should submit  three poems, typed (max. 3 pp. total) as email attachments to pdxmws@mountainwriters.org with Rutsala Workshop in the subject line.  

Cost: $100 [One three-hour session] 
Meets: 1-4 p.m., Sunday, January 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Maximum 10 
Location: 23 Sandy Gallery (map) , 623 NE 23rd, PDX 97202

Vern Rutsala is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including The Moment’s Equation, finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and How We Spent Our Time, 2004 Akron Poetry Prize winner. Among other awards are a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Richard Snyder Prize, a Masters Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize, the Northwest Poets Prize and the Kenneth O. Hanson Award.

Now Professor Emeritus, Rutsala taught at Lewis & Clark College from 1961-2004. 

Kathleen Halme 

The Multiverse of Poetry

Does your poetry sometimes feel like an impact crater, a tree snag, or the missing matter in the universe? Build neural pathways as Kathleen Halme shares her insights as a non-scientist who often finds inspiration in the intersection of science and art. This workshop, for all levels of writers, will focus on expanding the possibilities of subject, stance, and form. It will energize your poetry, generate new work, and offer strategies for exciting the molecules of drafts that resist revision. A small sample of published contemporary poems dealing with how our encounters with the world shape us and our art will be sent to students when they enroll in the course and will serve as a text for the session.

Please submit a typed draft of one “stuck” poem you have been working on (any subject, three pages or less) to Mountain Writers Series no later than February 25th. It should be a poem that has defied your best revision strategies and that you are willing to share with the group.

Cost: $90 [One three-hour session] 
Meets: 1-4 p.m., Sunday, February 2011: ENROLLMENT CLOSED. Enrollment: Maximum 12
Location: 23 Sandy Gallery (map) , 623 NE 23rd, PDX 97202

Kathleen Halme's books of poetry are Every Substance Clothed, winner of University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition and 1995 Balcones Poetry Prize; Equipoise (1998); and Drift and Pulse (2007). The Everlasting Universe of Things was selected as winner of the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition by Edward Hirsch. She has had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

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Paulann Petersen

Second Sight: A Poetry Workshop

The word "revision" offers us a bracing truth. To truly revise is to do much more than mere editing and tinkering: it's learning to see our poems anew, moving them toward their strengths. In this workshop, we'll spend the sessions critiquing your poems, looking at possible directions for revision. I'll use these critiques as opportunities for short lessons, addressing issues of craft raised by the particular poem we're looking at. There's no way to predict exactly which craft issues will emerge, but surely line integrity (line breaks), sound form (musical devices), compression, tone, effectiveness of trope, and dramatic strategy will be among them. Open to writers of all levels.

Cost: $85 General/$80 MWS members [2 Wednesdays]
Meets: 7-10 p.m., 2 Wednesdays: ENROLLMENT CLOSED.
Enrollment: Maximum 12; minimum 6.
Location: Looking Glass Bookstore (map), 7983 SE 13th Ave, PDX 97202

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