Upcoming Summer Workshops & Courses
Novel Support: Weekly Check-In
July 30 - September 17, 2026, Thursdays (8 sessions) | 6-8pm| Online via Zoom with Literary Arts
Are you writing a novel? Do you want company? Writing a novel is an intensive and often lonely experience. This course brings novel writers at all stages of the process together to support each other for 8 weeks. From first draft through revision, this course is a weekly check in, a community gathering, a discussion group, an accountability buddy, a toolkit, a troubleshooting session, and a place for us to talk about our novels and writing processes as much as we need to without boring anyone. Each week, we’ll spend time checking in about our novels, discussing issues and breakthroughs, and providing feedback on each other’s work. To best suit the needs of the group, course instruction will be specifically tailored to the questions that arise during class. Participants will receive peer and instructor feedback on a small section (up to 3,000 words) of their work.
Short Story Mornings
September 15 - October 20 (6 sessions) | 10-11:30 am PT | in person at The Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon
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.
Reviving Old Fiction: A Revisioning Workshop
November 3 - December 8 (6 sessions) | 10-11:30 am PT | in person at The Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon
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.
Past Courses
CREATIVE WRITING
Writing with Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems | Writing Workshops
Performing Your Work | Literary Arts
The First 10 Pages | The Loft
Writing with Tarot | Literary Arts
Nature Writing | Salem Public Library
Novel Support | Literary Arts
Your Novel’s First Pages | Literary Arts
Natures of Narrative Structure: Seeking Your Novel’s Shape | The Loft
Writing with the Seasons | Literary Arts
Intermediate Fiction | Linfield University
Speculative Memoir Workshop | Deschutes Public Library
Experiments in Narrative Structure Workshop | Portland Book Festival
Writing Feminist Fairy Tales | The Loft
Advanced Creative Writing | Fiction | Portland Community College
Beginning Creative Writing | Fiction | Portland Community College
Beginning Creative Writing | Prose | University of Washington
LITERATURE, COMPOSITION & RESEARCH
Northwest Literature | Portland Community College
College Writing – Environmental Writing | Portland Community College
Film as Art | Portland Community College
College Writing – Feminist Literature | Portland Community College
Writing with Research | hybrid, online, and f2f | Portland Community College
College Writing | hybrid course | Portland Community College
College Writing | University of Washington
World Literature – Fairy Tales | online | Renton Technical College
College Writing and Writing with Research | online and f2f | Renton Technical College
Technical Writing | Renton Technical College