Upcoming Summer Workshops & Courses
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.
Roots in Old Stories: Writing with Folklore, Mythology, and Fairy Tales
October 29 - December 10, 2026 (no class Nov 26) Thursdays (8 sessions) | 6-8pm| in person with Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon
Folkloric writing can take many forms. From the overtly fantastical to the strangely realistic, the old tales are flexible. They shift over times and tellers. Their presence in our work can move from obvious to subtle. In this course, we’ll study writing that engages with folklore in a wide variety of ways: speculative memoir that tangles with witch tales, poems that draw on botanical lore, short story fairy tale retellings, mythic poetry and fiction, and more. Through discussion, reflection, and generative writing exercises, we’ll consider how we use old stories and lore in our own work. Suitable for writers at all stages, you can use this course to start a new project or continue work on an ongoing one. Prose writers, poets, and all writers between are welcome.
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