Letters and Poems, Poems and Letters

Write a letter that will never be sent to a person, animal, or thing who does or does not exist, or to a number of people, animals or things who do or do not exist. Make your letter plainspoken and colloquial, didactive even. Be strident. Be emphatic. Consider what the “truth” means within the context of a letter such as this one. Give your letter a title.  

Next, translate your letter into a poem. Your poem should have the opposite impulses as your letter—make it far-flung, expressive, “creative,” disjunctive, lyrical, ambiguous, etc. It can be shorter if you’d like, written in lines or stanzas. (Although prose poems are great too.) In your poem, consider writing so far into the “truth” that you come out the other side. Give your poem a title, one that indirectly references the title of your letter.

Bonus exercise: Having written your poem and letter, combine them into a new work, both poem and letter.    

Jeff Alessandrelli is a writer and editor living in Portland. The Kenyon Review called his most recent poetry collection Fur Not Light “an example of radical humility” and, entitled Nothing of the Month Club, the UK press Broken Sleep released an alternate version of Fur Not Light in 2021. Jeff is most recently the author of the novel And Yet.  In addition to his writing Jeff also directs and co-edits the non-profit record label/book press Fonograf Editions. He’s at https://jeffalessandrelli.net/

Writing with Ghosts in the Archival Machine

In this generative, open-genre craft workshop, participants will explore various library and archival materials with sensitivity to ghosts in the archival machine. With the support of a librarian-writer facilitator and experimental writing prompts, participants will transition from research to writing with archival ghosts. This workshop adopts an expansive notion of “ghosts” to include benevolent spirits, ancestors, underrepresented histories, transformed landscapes, extinct species, geologic change, and more. Participants are welcome, but not required, to bring their own mysterious research topics to the workshop. Come ready to experiment with lists, found poems, automatic writing, and more!

Katy Anastasi (she/her) is a Reference & Instruction Librarian at Clark College and a graduate student at Eastern Oregon University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Susan Dingle  is the current Clark County Poet Laurate. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry has been published in several periodicals, and she is the author of two books: In Pilgram Drag, published by Finishing Line Press and Parting Gifts, published by Local Gems. Dingle earned a master of social work degree at SUNY Stony Brook University and is a licensed clinical social worker and alcohol and substance abuse counselor.

Writing the Magical, Writing the Real: On Making Magical Stories Believable

A caterpillar dissolves until it is entirely liquid and then puts itself back together as a butterfly. If we could talk to trees, tap into their roots and fungal networks, what would they say? A fairy has flitted around the room and landed atop my wrist before zooming out the window. Magic is all around us if we know how to look for it. For thousands of years, humans have been telling stories about magical creatures and occurrences existing among the mundane. In this workshop, we’ll discuss techniques for seeing the magic in the world, as well as the craft elements that make magical stories more believable.

Emme Lund is an author living and writing in Portland, OR. She has an MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, TIME Magazine, The Rumpus, Romper, the Portland Mercury, and Autostraddle, among many other venues. Her debut novel, The Boy with a Bird in His Chest (Atria Books, 2022) was longlisted for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction, was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award, was named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed and The Portland Mercury, and was included on lists in The Washington Post, USA Today, People Magazine, The Advocate, Cosmopolitan, and Shondaland.

Talk Short to Me

Published originally as poems, many of Anne Carson's "Short Talks" function like micro essays--bursts of prose that incorporate research, synthesis, and speculation. This class works through a few of Carson's short talks and closes with a generative prompt to get you started on a Talk of your own.

Elena Passarello's essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been translated into six languages. Her recent work appears in the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Audubon and Best American Science and Nature Writing.  She is the author of two collections, the most recent of which, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. It made the Best Books of 2017 lists from several publications including the Guardian and Publisher’s Weekly. Her next book, about the spotty legacy of Elvis Presley, is forthcoming from Penguin Press in 2027. You can hear Elena every week on the nationally syndicated public radio program Live Wire!

’As You Know, Captain…’ Avoiding Infodump in Speculative Fiction

Infodump is a major occupational hazard in fiction—especially for writers of fantasy and SF. After all your worldbuilding, all your hard-SF research, how do you introduce backstory or technical details without bogging down your story? Join award-winning fantasy & SF author Joe Pitkin for tips dealing with this challenge—including examples from his most recent novel, Exit Black, published by Blackstone last year!

Joe Pitkin has lived, taught, and studied in England, Hungary, Mexico, and at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. His short stories have appeared in The Boston Review, Analog, Black Static, Cosmos, and other magazines and podcasts, as well as on his blog, The Subway Test. He lives in Portland, Oregon, in the shadow of a small extinct volcano. Stranger Bird, his first novel, was published in 2017; his most recent novel, Exit Black, was published by Blackstone last year.

Character Development: A Generative Tarot Writing Journey

Every character carries a hidden pulse—unruly, half-buried—an ache, a murmur, a signal from somewhere just beyond the visible. In this generative workshop, we’ll use the Tarot as both lens and interlocutor, tracing that pulse as it moves through interior weather, memory, and imagined terrain. The cards will guide us toward what resists easy knowing: a character’s psyche, backstory, contradictions, secrets, and desires. Writers working in fiction, memoir, and hybrid forms are all welcome—as are characters in any stage of becoming, from newly emerging voices to longtime companions. No prior knowledge or experience with Tarot is necessary to enjoy this class.

Selah Saterstrom Selah Saterstrom is the author of the innovative novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, as well as two nonfiction collections, Rancher and the award-winning Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics. She is the co-founder of Four Queens Divination, an online platform dedicated to the intersection of creative writing and divinatory arts, where she offers classes and mentorship. With twenty-five years of experience teaching and leading graduate programs in diverse settings around the world, Selah now lives on Vashon Island with her wife and daughter. She is at work on a collection of essays exploring queer rurality and completing a book on divination theory.

Zenyatta Mondatta

In this generative poetry workshop, we’ll focus on how poems can sound amazing and memorable, with language that resonates before it even means. Inspired by Zenyatta Mondatta, the third album by The Police, and Stewart Copeland’s description of its title as “syllables that sound good together, like the sound of a melody that has no words at all has a meaning,” we’ll listen closely to the music of some notable poems, and write some new poems of indubitably remarkable euphonics.

Ed Skoogm is the author of four collections of poetry, Mister Skylight, Rough Day, Run the Red Lights, and Travelers Leaving for the City. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, and the Best American Poetry series. He lives in Portland.

Poetry and Art: Ekphrastic Poetry

In this workshop, we will review the different methods for writing poetry about artwork, focusing on painting. We will briefly discuss example poems about Van Gogh's "Starry Night".  The workshop participants will have an opportunity to write an ekphrastic poem about paintings selected by the workshop leader.

Gerald Donnelly Smith has published poems in various literary journals including, The Adirondack Review, hummingbird, River Wind, Icon, Talking Leaves and his work appears in the following anthologies War (Green Haven, 2007), The X-Y Experience (2001), and Playing with a Full Deck. His chapbook The American Corpse appeared in The Apex of the M; Hill of the Star (Logan Elm Press, 1992) was chosen for The Governor's Award for the Arts in Ohio. The broadside "Melting Glass/Derritiendo Vidrio " illustrated by Adrian Tio (Logan Elm Press 1989) was chosen for the Medici Gold Circle Award (1991). He has also published Hispania, a bilingual pamphlet (Logan Elm Press 1992); and “Feathered Serpent” five bilingual broadsides, each illustrated by a Hispanic artist (Logan Elm Press 1991). Gerard wrote a column, “The Insurgent Word” for Swans, a socialist e-Journal, from 2003-2008, contributing essays and poems. He served as the director of the Columbia Writers Series at Clark College for seven years.

Multidisciplinary Workshop: Reading & Writing with Images 

This workshop will explore creative writing through a hybrid, multidisciplinary lens. How does one read an image? How do text/words image meaning? And how can the juxtapositions of image and text together affect a blended, evocative synergy of meaning that conveys more than a single medium of languaging can do on its own? We will use photographs, image-text samples, discussion, and ekphrastic writing and collaborative exercises to explore the interrelationships of text and image on the page, and the possibilities—for both reading and writing—that arise in the spaces in-between these literary and visual modes of voicing.

Dao Strom is a poet, musician, writer, and interdisciplinary artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author/composer of several hybrid-literary works, including the poetry-art collection, INSTRUMENT, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE, and the forthcoming TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025). Recently, she co-edited/co-curated the hybrid-literary anthology + exhibit A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS (2024). Strom’s work encompasses both solo and collaborative art and writing projects, and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, Oregon Community Foundation, and others. She is a founding member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), among other collaborative projects. Born in Vietnam, Strom lives in Portland, Oregon. Website: daostrom.com / IG: @herandthesea 

Multidisciplinary Workshop: Reading & Writing with Images

This workshop will explore creative writing through a hybrid, multidisciplinary lens. How does one read an image? How do text/words image meaning? And how can the juxtapositions of image and text together affect a blended, evocative synergy of meaning that conveys more than a single medium of languaging can do on its own? We will use photographs, image-text samples, discussion, and ekphrastic writing and collaborative exercises to explore the interrelationships of text and image on the page, and the possibilities—for both reading and writing—that arise in the spaces in-between these literary and visual modes of voicing.

Dr. Tara Williams (she/her) earned her MFA in Fiction at Fresno State University. She also holds a masters and doctorate in education. Currently she teaches composition and literature courses at Clark. Her literary work has appeared in Southwest Review, Tales of the Fantastic, Fatal Flaw, and other publications, and her short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress won an honorable mention for the Plentitudes Prize, and an audio adaptation of one of her short stories took 2nd place in Sycamore Review’s Deanna Tulley Multimedia Contest. Her work is also included in the climate fiction anthology Fire & Water: Stories of the Anthropocene (Black Lawrence Press, 2021).

The Poetry of Memoir

Oftentimes, the stories that make up our personal and collective history come in the form of prose, yet how can poetry weave itself into nonfiction? How can we utilize poetic techniques to create complexity and emotion when telling our narratives? We will explore poetic memoirs and how lyricism can create emotional depth, sensory tenderness, and imaginative leaps. We will consider poetic memoir passages from Carvell Wallace, Safiya Sinclair, and Jami Nakamura Lin. Along with discussion, we will write together via generative prompts and also have time for sharing.

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), winner of the Washington State book award. She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she has exhibited her poetry installations and performances at the Frye Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University.