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Events & Classes > Workshops for the Beginning Writer

Workshops for the Beginning Writer

Basic, practical workshops geared to the beginning writer, taught by published authors. Pencils and paper will be provided.

Printable Workshops for the Beginning Writer flyer (pdf)

Paulann Petersen

Anyone’s Domain: A Basic Poetry Writing Workshop with Paulann Petersen

Poetry is not the domain of just a few. It’s as natural and accessible as heartbeat and breath. Writing poetry requires nothing more than a love of words and a willingness to let your pen move across a page, following language wherever it takes you. Join Paulann Petersen in an afternoon devoted to creating poems and talking about some of the basic elements of poetry. Beginners welcome.

Paulann Petersen’s books of poetry are The Wild Awake (Confluence Press), Blood-Silk (Quiet Lion Press), and A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A fourth collection, Kindle, was released by Mountains and Rivers Press in 2008. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts, she serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January Stafford Birthday Events.

Rodger Larson

Creating A Scene: The Basic Unit of Storytelling with Rodger Larson

Creative Writing is a joyous experience. It offers the writer emotional release, personal expression, and the knowledge that your voice is in the world being heard. It can also be a confusing place, especially for beginning writers. A clear understanding of how scenes work can reduce this confusion. Writing a novel or memoir requires knitting various elements together such as character, plot, and setting, in a way that creates emotional involvement in the reader. These fictive elements are in play at the most basic unit of storytelling: The Scene. In Creating A Scene we will examine and discuss how character, plot, and setting interact to create a dynamic scene. Join Rodger Larson in an afternoon of focused conversation and writing to help you write your story and to understand the benefits of using the scene as a building block to creating the arc of your story.

Rodger Larson is the author of What I Know Now, a coming of age novel set in 1957. His novel won the Andreas Berger Award for best fiction presented by Northwest Writers Inc. It was also a finalist for an Oregon Book Award. Rodger teaches at various local colleges including: Linfield College, Portland Community College, and Portland State University. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Humanities from The Evergreen State College, and a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He is currently deep in revision of his second novel, Raindog.

Joanna Rose

The Things They Carried: Writing the Real World with Joanna Rose

Proust had his cookie, Sam Gamgee his tin of salt, and Tim O’Brien had all those things they carried - ordinary objects that became sacred elements on the journey of the hero through the wasteland. Throughout this afternoon of writing and sharing, we’ll explore the use of the Object as it serves story and leads us into the psychological riches of narrative. An Object can be the key to a mystery, a humanizing fact of our daily lives, or it can simply jumpstart the impulse to write.

Joanna Rose is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange, and has recently completed a second novel. Her short story If Your Hands Would be Like That was recently published in Artisan Journal, and her essay Paisley Afternoon is in the Oregon anthology Citadel of the Spirit. She is also known to readers of The Oregonian as a regular reviewer on the books page. She and her teaching partner Stevan Allred host the regular Pinewood Table prose critique group, and she teaches in schools around Oregon and Washington.

Tom Spanbauer

An Introduction to Dangerous Writing with Tom Spanbauer

What makes writing dangerous is something personal, very small, and quiet. In this class, we will be asked to go to parts of ourselves where there is an old silence, where it is secret, where it is dark and sore. One of the goals of the class will be to go to where we’ve never gone before, writing down what scares the hell out of us. Eventually to the very foundation and structure of how we perceive, and in this investigation, we can challenge old notions of who we are. The New York Times, in its review of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, called it Poisoned Lyricism. Character lies in the destruction of the sentence. How a character thinks is how she speaks. The class will be, as Annie Dillard has called it, ‘alligator wrestling at the level of the sentence.’ By studying sentences, by taking them apart and looking at all their elements, by tuning them to how our particular narrator thinks, and ultimately speaks, we can begin to create a music that is unique.

As a writer, Tom Spanbauer explores issues of race, sexual identity, and how we make a family for ourselves in order to surmount the limitations of the families into which we are born. As a teacher, his innovative approach combines close attention to language with a large-hearted openness to what he calls 'the sore place' — that place within each of us that is the source for stories that no one else can tell. His novels are are notable for their combination of a fresh and lyrical prose style with solid storytelling. They include Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, In the City of Shy Hunters and Now Is the Hour.

Made possible by the Tarshis Family Endowment of The Library Foundation.