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Mountain Writers Series |
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Writing Workshops 2025
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, though 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 a great exercise for novelists and short story writers who want practice working with dialogue.
Leanne Grabel
Graphic Flash Memoir
I have been in love with flash memoir, with one detail illustrated, for at least the past decade. I wish the form had a less clunky name than graphic flash memoir—but that’s what it is. Frankly, I think it is a perfect genre for 2025. I truly believe that attention spans have contracted in the digital age. I know mine has. Going on and on and on is just not a thing anymore—not a way I want to tell a story or read a story.
In flash memoir, the details of memory are culled and recounted SUCCINCTLY and CLEARLY. And then the challenge is to shape or collage the short pieces into a whole that creates a full-length personal narrative that is almost poetic in its shape, form, chronology. The end product is a memoir in prose poetry, basically.
Maira Kalman, Roz Chast, Ellen Forney, Nora Krug—these four have inspired me this past decade. Their combination of short chunks of text and simple drawings works for me. And regarding those damn illustrations, to be clear: I am not a great artist—in fact, I don’t consider myself a visual artist at all. I just choose to draw details that are easy to draw. I can Google “how to draw a jar of Ovaltine from 1959” and be shown hundreds of drawings in every style imaginable. Then I make it my own. I would never try to draw my entire family sitting at a dinner table—instead, I would draw a plate of chicken breasts, a salad, or a bowl of peas—not that we eat that many peas. In this one-day class, we will look at numerous examples of flash memoir and prose poetry, illustrated and not. You will create a list of possible topics: impactful people, places, things, events. And then you will write. We will share rough drafts with each other (as a whole class) and give feedback. And then you will hopefully have the time to finalize a piece or two. We will end the day with a casual reading of the work created. You will also be inspired, hopefully, to continue—topic list in hand. There are many examples of my graphic flash on my website [http://leannegrabel.com].
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Portland, OR |
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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), all 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 Bershires. She taught writing 
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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If you have questions or wish to withdraw from a workshop, please write volunteer program coordinators at programs@mountainwriters.org and we will get back to you soon. If a reservation for a class or workshop is canceled 3 days or more prior to the start of a class or workshop, a refund of 75% will be made, less a $25.00 administrative fee. The reservation may be converted to a credit for an upcoming class or workshop, good for one year, if preferred. For any cancellation 48 hours or less before a class or workshop is scheduled to begin, no refund will be made, nor will a credit toward a future workhop or class be given.