Workshops Friday and Saturday, November 2 and 3
OSU/Cascades and COCC campuses - room assignments are listed below. See complete schedule at bottom of page. Buy Tickets Now
Driving directions to OSU/COCC campuses
Campus locations of Workshops, Rising Star Awards and Ted Kooser Lecture
Click here to visit the Bend Visitors & Convention Bureau for lodging, travel and all things Bend!
Timothy Egan
Of Time and Place (workshop will be offered twice) Offered Friday, 11/2, morning and Saturday, 11/3, afternoon
As an award-winning author of historical nonfiction, Timothy Egan is a master at weaving the details of events and locations into an engaging narrative. Mr. Egan will offer his insights into placing the reader in a situation or environment and bringing the story to life. The workshop will look at how to use detail, and a reporter's eye, to build characters, drama and a narrative arc within a book. The emphasis is on anchoring yourself to a place as a centerpiece for any good work of nonfiction.
Debra Magpie Earling
Picture This - Glimpse Memories, Life Moments Offered Friday, 11/2, afternoon
Toward the end of her brief and brilliant life, the writer Katherine Mansfield focused her attention on small but powerful moments (both real and imagined) as the substance of her final work. She was convinced that life held extraordinary and life changing flashes of beauty that was the only stuff worth writing. Stories for her became small-contained moments of being. In this workshop we will explore your own glimpse memories. Your tightly focused recollections will illuminate our discussions, provide storytelling entertainment, and inspire your writing.
Match Strike Stories - Lists and Story Scenarios Offered Saturday, 11/3, morning
What’s on your mind when you sit down to write and how do you shape your writing so that it contains a driving plot? Do you find yourself frustrated by the lack of narrative in your stories? What makes a story work? What are the plot points that need to be present in a story to give it shape and substance? In this class we will tap into your ideas, your dreams, and the stories that are waiting to surface. We will look at the substantive techniques of plot and begin to shape your ideas into stories.
Heather Vogel Frederick
Borrowed Fire: Getting to the Heart of Character (workshop will be offered twice) Offered Friday, 11/2, morning and Saturday, 11/3, afternoon
The beating heart of story is character. It’s the glue that holds it all together, the engine that drives the train. So how do writers go about creating memorable characters? Come find out in this workshop geared primarily but not exclusively for those interested in writing for children and young adults. Touching on such aspects of craft as voice, point of view, dialogue, description – and the crucial ingredient Heather calls “borrowed fire” – we’ll explore how to construct characters who will linger in the minds of readers long after a book is closed.
Craig Johnson
Mapping the Novel: Location, Location, Location Offered Friday, 11/2, afternoon
As Studs Terkel said, "Nothing happened nowhere." The strongest character in your work may just be the setting, and the landscape of your story describes more than just the scenery. The effects of locality on character, plot, and almost every aspect of your novel are too important to be ignored. Join author Craig Johnson in whipping out the Rand McNally and taking a literary road trip to where your writing is going and what place means.
Dialogue and the Revelation of Character Offered Saturday, 11/3, morning
Learn about defining character through the oldest and most powerful trick in the book, dialogue. The mechanics of dramatic characterization can be discerned through what the character says, what is said about the character, and what the character does. In this hands-on workshop, playwright turned novelist Craig Johnson reveals the tricks of the trade in developing realistic and compelling dialogue that delineates character.
Ted Kooser
Out of the Ordinary Offered Friday, 11/2, 11:15 a.m.
Ted Kooser once wrote a short poem that goes, "If you can awaken / inside the ordinary / and discover it strange / you need never leave home." That is, there's a world to write about right under our noses. Most of Ted's work as a poet has been in bringing his readers' attention to the fascinations of the ordinary world around them. He will talk about this approach and answer questions.
Kathleen Dean Moore
The Nature Essay: Practicing the Osprey's Art (workshop will be offered twice) Offered Friday, 11/2, morning and Saturday, 11/3, morning
Here is how an osprey hunts: soaring over water, patiently watching. All she sees are surfaces, reflections on the riffles, the glistening pines. Then the angle of light changes, or the direction of the wind, and the osprey catches a glimpse of a shadow under the surface of the water. She tucks her wings and dives. So it is with the nature essay. A nature essay begins with patient, loving, informed observation of a particular location. Then it pursues a truth briefly revealed in that place. In this workshop, we will practice diving, the art of moving between experience and an exploration of its meaning.
Benjamin Percy
Voices Offered Friday, 11/2, morning
“Mother died today.” In this famous first line from The Stranger by Albert Camus, we find only three words, but they are rich with meaning. Our narrator doesn’t say, “Mom,” nor “Ma,” nor “Mamma.” But Mother. There is such formality here, such distance. Combine this with the verb “died” —its almost robotic straight-forwardness—and we begin to understand our narrator as emotionally shut off, separate from the world. All of this from a few spare words. This is what our workshop concerns: how voice betrays the interior worlds of characters, and how your grammatical choices (and their rhetorical effects) can illuminate not only your story as a whole, but a scene in particular.
Tropes Offered Saturday, 11/3, afternoon
Consider the orange. In The Godfather, every time one appears, bad things happen. A character gets beat up or shot or falls flat on his face after suffering a heart attack. A simple, innocent fruit somehow becomes—over the course of the story—a harbinger of evil. This is a trope, a recurring element that gains more and more power and meaning every time it passes through the juggler’s hands. Tropes—not plot—are the building blocks of short fiction. We will discuss their use by looking at the work of Tim O’Brien, Tony Earley, Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Denis Johnson, among others.
Pattiann Rogers
Perspective Offered Friday, 11/2, afternoon
In every poem we write, we decide where we want to stand as poet in time and space in relation to the world created within the poem. The perspective the voice assumes makes a grand difference in the possibilities for the poem and what the poem eventually becomes. In this workshop we’ll look at poems in which perspective is important, discuss the various perspectives taken, and then do some writing experiments involving perspective.
Writing Outside the Box Offered Saturday, 11/3, afternoon
The challenge is to write poems that are stunningly new and original in perception or concept, in beauty, humor, imagination or vocabulary, or a combination of these. In this workshop, we’ll try different ways to extricate ourselves from the ordinary and the expected in language. The goal is to experience the pleasure and fun of seeing something new in our own work, to surprise ourselves by what we write.
Workshop Schedule
Friday, November 2, 9:00 –11:00 a.m.
Heather Vogel Frederick (Borrowed Fire: Getting to the Heart of Character) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 248
Benjamin Percy (Voices) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 117
Timothy Egan (Of Time and Place) Room OSU -Cascades Hall Room 118
Kathleen Dean Moore (The Nature Essay: Practicing the Osprey's Art) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 114
Friday, November 2, 11:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
Ted Kooser Lecture and Q&A (Out of the Ordinary) (COCC Library Rotunda)
Friday, November 2, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Pattiann Rogers (Perspective) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 114
Debra Magpie Earling (Picture This: Glimpse Memories, Life Moments) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 117
Craig Johnson (Mapping the Novel: Location, Location, Location) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 118
Saturday, November 3, 9:00 – 11:00 a.m.
Kathleen Dean Moore (The Nature Essay: Practicing the Osprey's Art) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 114
Debra Magpie Earling (Match Strike Stories - Lists and Story Scenarios) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 117
Craig Johnson (Dialogue and the Revelation of Character) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 118
Saturday, November 3, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Heather Vogel Frederick (Borrowed Fire: Getting to the Heart of Character) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 104
Benjamin Percy (Tropes) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 117
Pattiann Rogers (Writing Outside the Box) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 114
Timothy Egan (Of Time and Place) OSU-Cascades Hall Room 118