Tuesdays, 7-8:30pm (Pacific Time), Sep 8 - Oct 13 | ZOOM

In this generative workshop we will reimagine our losses and bring light to the shadows. This creative exploration provides moments of great joy and connection. It is so satisfying to interrupt the stubborn "arrangements" in our psyches that are not serving us well. Writing consciously about grief has the potential to stir greater compassion for ourselves and others. You can expect to discover new threads in your work that inspire and energize fresh creative commitments and old dormant intentions.

Ed Sage’s poetry and nonfiction have been published in ZYZZYVA, The Portland Review, The Ponder Review, Plainsongs, BULL Lit, The Passionfruit Review, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, among others.

Tuesdays, 10 - 11:30am, Sep 15 - Oct 20

Start your day with short stories! Read five short stories. Write and workshop one. Over six weeks, we’ll explore how varied the short story form can be, focusing on craft elements and writing techniques. We’ll learn about creating characters, building plot, developing setting, exploring theme and symbol, and writing sentences that sing. Participants will write one short story in this workshop, receiving peer and instructor feedback in a supportive environment to help them revise. 

Wednesdays, 6:30 - 8pm, Sep 16 - Oct 21  

Have you written and rewritten the first chapter of your novel but have trouble continuing? In this class, you will study your novel's opening pages while free-writing and daydreaming toward a detailed outline that will lead to your finished work. You’ll also have the opportunity to critique the opening pages of your classmates' novels, read the opening pages of other writers’ novels, and review the elements of fiction writing. 

Thursdays, 11am - 12:30pm, Sep 17 - Oct 22

What makes a great personal essay? What makes reading some essays feel like we’ve learned not only about the author’s experiences, but about ourselves and the world around us? In this class, we’ll read and discuss a few classic and contemporary personal essays, work on original essay prompts, and share our own work. Students can either bring a work in progress that they'd like to workshop, or become inspired to begin writing a new one. By the end, we’ll have a greater appreciation of the craft of personal essays, and a better understanding of how to look beyond ourselves and make our personal essays less personal and more universal. 

Mondays, 10 - 11:30am, Sep 21 - Oct 26

Using prompts, short readings, and discussion, this generative nonfiction workshop will focus on mining our personal histories and crafting them into the form they deserve. We’ll also explore the ways we sometimes get in the way of our own stories — and how to use that to break through and write around the blocks. CNF, personal essays, journaling...all are welcome. Open to all writers.  

Mondays, 12 - 1:30pm, Sep 21 - Oct 26

This workshop is intended for students who seek accountability in the form of a supportive community to share and receive feedback on their works in progress. Whether you are writing a memoir, essay or a piece that’s still taking shape, this Nonfiction workshop offers deadlines, camaraderie and support as you move forward with your work. 

Tuesdays, 5:30 - 7pm, Sep 22 - Oct 27 | ZOOM

Using prompts, short readings, and discussion, this generative nonfiction workshop will focus on mining our personal histories and crafting them into the form they deserve. We’ll also explore the ways we sometimes get in the way of our own stories — and how to use that to break through and write around the blocks. CNF, personal essays, journaling...all are welcome. Open to all writers. Zoom link provided prior to workshop. 

Wednesdays, 10 - 11:30am, Sep 23 - Oct 28 | ZOOM

"Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention." ~ Howard Rheingold

Writing in the age of distraction and dire news often requires a Herculean effort to stay focused. What does it mean to reclaim our attention and what kind of revolutions can we mount with a pen, a notebook and renewed focus?  In this workshop we’ll pay attention to what we pay attention to, retool our writing practices and cultivate the concentration needed to do deep work. Each week you’ll be offered one Reading and one Action to complete, as well as a writing prompt. In class you’ll have a chance to report your observations and experience.

Mondays, 10:30am - 12pm (Pacific Time), Oct 5 - Nov 9 | ZOOM

In this generative workshop we will explore how the image works in different kinds of poems. From deep images, to leaping images, to controlling images. With poets such as Garrett Hongo, Dorianne Laux, Lucille Clifton, Larry Levis and others as our guides we will write our own image driven poems while deepening and strengthening our relationship to poetry and to language itself. Open to all poets.

Tuesdays, 4 - 6pm (Pacific Time), Oct 6 - Nov 3 | ZOOM

Minimum words, maximum impact. Flash nonfiction, simply put, is true-to-life writing defined by extreme compression. It's saying what you've got to say using as few words, and as much beauty, as possible. An endlessly accessible, playful, potent form, flash nonfiction is evermore popular; from Brevity to Barren, The Forge to The Sun, legions of journals are publishing great flash. This class is open to all writers, whether you're new to flash or finishing your first collection. Over five weeks, students will read stellar flash, begin new pieces, workshop works-in-progress, and move toward submitting work for publication. | Maximum: 16 writers. Open to all writers.

Thursdays, 6:30 - 8pm (Pacific Time), Oct 8 - Nov 12 | ZOOM

Place shapes us before we have words for it. This workshop looks at how poets have written about landscape, region, and the ground they know, or have lost, with a keen eye for detail, earned veracity, and vitality. Over six weeks we will read poets for whom place is sacred ground: Heaney on the Irish bog, Jeffers on the California coast, Forché on Central America torn by war. We will look how the physical world enters into the poem and what it carries when it does, paying particular attention to what arises in times of conflict. Writers will bring their own landscapes to the table and develop new ways of translating the signals they carry to the page. 

Sundays, 10am - 12pm (Pacific Time), Oct 18 - Nov 22 | ZOOM

How do we fill our emotional and creative bowls when they are emptied? How do we write when dealing with stress, grief, or anxiety? I believe we can turn to the physical world for guidance and support. In this 6-week generative class, we will write and share together, exploring our own immediate work alongside poems by Michael Dickman, Katie Peterson, Callie Siskel, Erin Clarke, Robin Coste Lewis, Major Jackson, and others. Join me and let's fill our bowls together! Limit: 12 writers.

Mondays, 10:30am - 12pm (Pacific Time), Nov 16 - Dec 21 | ZOOM

Have you set your novel aside for years but it keeps tugging you back to it? Keep thinking about a short story that’s been sitting in your drafts folder for a decade? This course is dedicated to reviving old works through deep re-visioning. We’ll strive to identify what it is about the work that keeps calling you back to it and thinking outside of the piece’s original shape to find the form that truly tells it. This may mean radically changing the story’s structure or even taking what resonates–the characters, a setting, an event–and placing it in an entirely different premise. This course isn’t for putting a bit of polish on the sentences before submitting the story. It’s for taking the work apart, rewriting it, and putting it all together in a different shape. This course will focus on participant’s projects through frequent discussion and workshopping up to 20 pages each.

Mondays, 10:30am - 12pm (Pacific Time), Nov 16 - Dec 21 | ZOOM

Oregon poet William Stafford once remarked that poetry is "just talk, with a little luck in it.” In this generative workshop we will explore a plainspoken poetry, the poetry that does not yell "Here I am! Look at me!" but instead relies on its own steady and local music, and a little luck. With poets such as Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, Jane Kenyon, Harryette Mullen, Marie Howe, and William Stafford as our guides we will write our way into new poems and a lot of luck. Open to all poets.

Elevate Your Manuscript with David Biespiel

Are you wanting to send out your poetry manuscript to contests and publishing houses? Feel close, not sure it's ready, want one last look? Or maybe it's you want to know if you're on the right path? Open to reordering, cutting, finding gaps that need to be filled? Start the new year with a fresh take on your poetry manuscript. Get attention to the whole book. Together, one-on-one, we'll consult, reflect, and strategize. These one-on-one manuscript consultations include: two (2) one-hour Zoom or in-person meetings, a close reading and hand-made marks poem by poem on your manuscript, notes and feedback for you to use to guide your next steps.