Spring Writing Workshop

In this generative workshop, award-winning journalist, novelist, and poet Rebecca Clarren will guide participants through two exercises to demonstrate how the tools of poetry can enhance your non-fiction and vice versa.

Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the land and denizens of the American West for more than twenty-five years. Her latest book, THE COST OF FREE LAND: JEWS, LAKOTA AND AN AMERICAN INHERITANCE (Penguin/Viking, 2023), won many honors, including a Whiting Foundation Creative Non-Fiction Grant, an Oregon Book Award, and the Will Rogers Medallion Award; Kirkus Reviews and others named it a Best Book of 2023. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Arcade, 2018), was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. Her journalism has regularly appeared in The Nation, High Country News, Ms., and others and has won a Sidney Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and ten grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Her poetry collection Drowning Lessons is currently out on submission; her poems have appeared in such places as North American Review and Poetry Northwest. She was longlisted for the 2025 Poet of the Year Prize from Only Poems. She lives in Portland, Ore., with her husband and two kids.

The opening paragraphs of a novel, short story, or memoir are critical for so many reasons: they establish urgency, voice, style, and tone; characters and setting are introduced; and stakes and conflict start to emerge. Consider these beginning paragraphs your story's first impression--you may only get one chance to charm readers (including agents and editors!). Spending everything (and hoarding nothing) makes your work instantly compelling . . . We will closely read and analyze successful beginnings in fiction and memoir (using examples from Denis Johnson, Justin Torres, Lisa Tadeo, Carmen Maria Machado, T Kira Madden, Sam Lipsyte, Toni Morrison, Jess Arndt, and others) and discuss ways you can bring these techniques into your own opening paragraphs.

Kimberly King Parsons is a National Book Award-nominee and the bestselling author of We Were the Universe, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, winner of the Oregon Book Award, a finalist for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Texas Book Award, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick ranked #2 on TIME Magazine's Best Books of 2024, and a best book of the year in Elle, Oprah Daily, Marie Claire, and others. Parsons’s debut collection, Black Light, was a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the Story Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters Award. Parsons teaches at Pacific University and lives in Portland.

Humans are part of nature, although we are often so disconnected from it. This workshop will help you explore the connections between yourself and the natural world, and teach you ways to thread what excites you about science into your writing. We will explore natural science facts together and practice using them for inspiration and thematic resonance in creative nonfiction. For example, the Amazon rainforest is a feedback loop between the rain and the forest: the forest creates the rain, which creates more trees, which creates more rain. An octopus’s arm has its own “brain”—each arm can move and make decisions independently from the central brain. Whales evolved from a land mammal ancestor, and their closest living land mammal relative is the hippopotamus. All of these delightful facts can be woven into memoir writing as resonant threads, imagery, metaphor, and structure. Together, we will explore how using science to inspire our writing can open up new ways of seeing and expressing ourselves and connect us to the world around us.

Eleanor Howell is an essayist and fiction writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from Western Washington University and teaches composition and literature at Clark College. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Pithead Chapel, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is currently working on an essay collection about adult ADHD diagnoses, whales, ecology, living in a human (animal) body, and other obsessions. You can find her published work and newsletter on her website, eleanorhowell.com.

This workshop is an invitation to notice the world around us and to play with words. Using found objects and found language borrowed from the campus environment, and drawing inspiration from works by past and present poets, participants will generate several new pieces of writing in prose or verse. There will be opportunities to collaborate, riff, shuffle, trade, listen, share, and compost or recycle.

Sam Lohmann is a parent, poet, academic librarian, and occasional translator living in Vancouver, Washington. He is a co-organizer of Portland's long-running Spare Room reading series and co-publisher (with David Abel) of Airfoil Chapbooks. He is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently Poems for Shy Communists (Airfoil, 2025).

This workshop is about shifting our attention from the idea of conclusion to a sense of wholeness, about world-building as an intuitive, emotional endeavor. When you leave the path of narrative convention, how do you know where you are and where you are going? How do you know when you get there? We’ll experiment with ways to identify the heart of your subject and how to stay true to it through image-patterning, association, rhythm, and other sentence-level choices.

Anne De Marcken is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Winner of the Novel Prize, her novel, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, was published in 2024 across North America, the UK, and Australia and has since received The Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize, the Cabell First Novel Prize, a PNBA award, and has been translated into eight languages. She is also the author of the lyric novella, The Accident: An Account, and her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Brick, Ploughshares, Narrative, Elastic, The Los Angeles Review, on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. Anne lives on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, where she runs the innovative small press The 3rd Thing.

Every character we write about has a body, but what role does that body play in our work, and how do we bring that physicality to the page? Using the guidance of Mary Karr, Han Kang, and Kiese Laymon, we will learn the techniques of mindfulness and defamiliarization, explore how to fully embody our characters, and practice using the five senses to add richness and complexity to our writing.

Emma Pattee lives in Portland, Oregon and has written about climate change for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. In 2021, she coined the term “Climate Shadow” to describe an individual’s potential impact on climate change. Her fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, Carve Magazine, Citron Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her debut novel, TILT, is a national bestseller, a NYT Editor’s Choice, and named by NPR, Time, Vogue and Bustle as a best book of the year.

The workshop will introduce students to the basics of crafting a persona poem, selecting the personae, and considering context, theme, and voice. Attendees will be asked to consider mythological, historical, political, social, and fictional/literary voices for their poems; for example, how Eve might have named the animals differently, or how Ahab might have regretted seeking vengeance on the white whale, or how the tortoise really won the race.

Gerard Donnelly Smith has published dozens of poems in various literary journals and anthologies, most recently in the Lothlorien Poetry Journal (2025), Silver Birch Press (2026), and North Coast Voices (2026). His most recent endeavor and ekphrastic collaboration with artist Jude Biscoff, Coyote and Bear Discuss Modern Art, was released in 2025. He directed the Columbia Writers Series at Clark College and was a regular contributor to Swans, a socialist e-journal, contributing over 100 essays, poems, and reviews (2003-2008). 

This workshop focuses on techniques for developing believable utopian societies. The building blocks of this approach are envisioning a hopeful (not perfect) future, considering ecological systems and limits, and aligning the society’s goals with its members’ needs and instincts.

Arwen Spicer is a science fiction writer and educator on the concept of believable utopias. Her doctoral work focused on ecology in utopian sci-fi. Her short fiction has appeared in the Ursula K. LeGuin-inspired anthology, Dispatches from Anarres, Dragon Soul Press’s Timeless II, and the Fabled Collective’s Women of the Woods. She recently published a low-tech, far-future novel, A Soldier in the Borderlands. arwenspicer.substack.com

This workshop focuses on identifying and using one’s authorial voice as a guide in nonfiction writing with multiple voices. How does one identify and stay true to the through line that weaves together the chorus of voices and stories that comprise a text? Starting from scratch with an oral interview transcript, we will focus on understanding what is at stake in the way the “i” is presented in a text, what to keep in mind as we edit the voices of our collaborators, and how to artfully guide our audiences.  

Christopher Teuton Osiyo nigada. My name is Chris Teuton, and I am a professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington-Seattle. I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a member of Echota-Tanasi Ceremonial Grounds in Park Hill, Oklahoma. I teach courses on Indigenous literature and storytelling, Indigenous Studies, and Indigenous research methods. I am grateful to have been taught by many elders, mentors, colleagues, friends, and students both inside and outside academia. My scholarship involves Indigenous oral and written literary studies, community-based cultural heritage and language revitalization work, and fieldwork exploring the perpetuation of Indigenous arts and epistemologies. I have published five books. These include Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club (UNC Press, 2012), winner of a 2013 American Book Award, and Cherokee Earth Dwellers: Stories and Teachings of the Natural World (UW Press, 2023), a Second Place Awardee of the 2023 Chicago Folklore Prize. Co-created with the late Cherokee National Treasures Hastings Shade and Loretta Shade, Cherokee Earth Dwellers presents a Cherokee ecology explored through Cherokee creature names, environmental relationships, traditional stories, and philosophical discussions with fluent Cherokee speakers and knowledge keepers. My most recent book publication, The Cherokee Natural World: Stories, Language, and Teachings (UBC Press, 2025), is an open-access, media-rich digital publication expanding from the print publication of Cherokee Earth Dwellers. Containing dozens of videos, interviews, and recordings of oral traditional stories and teachings, the center of the publication is the presentation of over 600 recorded Cherokee creature name pronunciations by Cherokee Nation elder and linguist Dr. Thomas N. Belt. 

In this workshop, we'll explore how poems resist stagnation by deploying turns—those lines or phrases that shift the direction and magnitude of a piece and transform the start of a poem into something surprising and wondrous by the final line. Through free writes, we'll develop our own structural turns to fit into first drafts or to reinvigorate stalling pieces that need a spark.

Armin Tolentino is the author of the poetry collection We Meant to Bring It Home Alive (Alternating Current Press) and co-author of the children’s book, Mythwakers: The Manananggal (Hope Well Books). He served as poet laureate for Clark County, WA, from 2021-2023 and is a former Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Carolyn Moore House Writer in Residency, and Atticus Hotel Artist in Residency. More info at www.armintolentino.com

Are you carrying an image you haven't identified? Do you know? What makes an image an image and not a description? Is this image isolated, or held beside other evidences, memories, terrains, lexicons –– made visible or invisible by them? In this hour, we will read several poems by various poets, follow their construction of image, and try to recover some of your own.

Consuelo Wise is a Guatemalan-American poet, writer, and visiting scholar at Portland State University. Her first book, b o y was published in 2024 (Omnidawn).  

Sometimes meaning is created between the lines. This craft workshop will share techniques for imaginative prose that create meaning through juxtaposition, gaps, and poetic leaps. It will include an interactive metaphor mapping exercise. Attendees will leave the workshop inspired to consider what they leave out of their prose as much as what they include. They will take away concrete methods to explore leaps, gaps, and contrasts in their writing.

Carly Rae Zent won the 2022 Literary Award in Fiction from Ninth Letter and is previously published in The Rumpus, The Offing, Salt Hill, Porter House Review, and more. She is an MFA graduate from Purdue University. Currently, she works in communications at Clark College and volunteers as a workshop facilitator with Write Around Portland.