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Mountain Writers Series |
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Archived WorkshopsPaulann PetersenDownstream: 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] Carl AdamshickPoetry 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.
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. William O'DalyThe Rose of EnergyPoetry, 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 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. Judith BarringtonThe 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] 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.
Peter SearsPoetry 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]
Kathleen HalmePoetry 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]
Kevin ClarkI'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] 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. Paulann PetersenDownstream: 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]
Martha Gies & Christine BourdetteWriting 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]
Christopher HowellPoetry 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] Location: 23 Sandy Gallery (map) , 623 NE 23rd, PDX 97202 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. Vern RutsalaMaster 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] 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. Kathleen HalmeThe 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.
Cost: $90 [One three-hour session] 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. Paulann PetersenSecond 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] |
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2804 SE 27th Avenue, #2 |
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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.
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). 
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.
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.
Below are some of the workshops that have been offered by Mountain Writers Series. If you would like to see these workshops offered again or have a request for a specific type of session or a particular workshop leader, please let us know at pdxmws@mountainwriters.org or call the message phone at 503.232.4517 and someone will return your call as soon as possible.
Register now for 2012 workshops