free workshop

Give your poems a post-Poetry-Month jolt with this free, online workshop offered by Bellingham Review. On Wednesday, May 15, 2024, at 6:00pm Pacific, Taneum Bambrick will offer a one-hour generative workshop “On Slime.” Register here.

Poetry Fest!

Poetry festival season is well under way, and with so much going on, it might just be time for a reminder of Poetry Fest at Village Books in Bellingham.

Events continue today, Sunday, April 14, 2024, at 4:00pm, with An Afternoon with Local Poets Jeffrey Morgan, Jessica Gigot, and Kevin Murphy.

That will be followed at 6:00pm with Anastacia-Renée reading from her brand-new book, Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere.

Next up is An Evening with Local Poets Jennifer Bullis, Jeremy Voigt, Linda Conroy, and Ryler Dustin, on Tuesday, April 16, at 6:00pm.

On Thursday, April 18, at 6:00pm, Mary Lou Kayser will read from her new collection, The Far Unlit Unknown.

On Sunday, April 21, at 2:00pm, Paul Nelson, Jason Wirth, and Adelia MacWilliam will read from Cascadian Zen, an anthology of nonfiction, poetry, interviews, translations, and artwork celebrating Zen within the Cascadia bioregion.

There are also three remaining Poetry Fest workshops:

• Wednesday, April 17, 6:00pm, Luther Allen presents How to Write a Poem About a Rock (and Everything Else)
• Friday, April 19, 10:30am, Subhaga Crystal Bacon presents Writing Erasure Poems. (And be sure to note that on Saturday, April 20, at 6:00pm, Subhaga Crystal Bacon will read from their Isabella Gardner Award-winning collection of elegies, Transitory.)
• Sunday, April 21, 4:00pm, Jessica Gigot presents Mothering as Transformation: a Poetic Journey

There’s more in store at Village Books for National Poetry Month, including VB Writes, Chuckanut Writers, and Open Mic with Seán Dwyer (for kids AND adults).

Steep in Words

In Portland, Oregon, Lan Su Chinese Garden is celebrating National Poetry Month with a series of afternoon readings and workshops. Steep in Words, organized with the assistance of Julia Gaskill, will take place “against the backdrop of the exquisite beauty of Lan Su in spring.”

festival season: 6

Port Angeles, “a gritty coastal village where the mountains meet the sea,” will host the first biennial Raymond Carver & Tess Gallagher Creative Writing Festival, April 25, 26, and 27, 2024. Special guests include Tess Gallagher, Billy Collins, TC Boyle, and Selected Shorts, plus there will be keynote readings, a film screening, a dance performance, conference style presentations, pie and poetry at Carver’s grave, writing workshops led by accomplished Northwest writers, and more. All events will be held on the Peninsula College campus, with the exception of the keynote readings, which will be held at the brand new Field Arts & Events Hall.

. . . . .
thanks to Risa Denenberg for the heads up!

festival season

In spring, as Cascadians emerge from their dens and begin to forage for sustenance, festivals and conferences put on a feast for hungry creatives.

In Bellingham, Village Books presents the first Poetry Fest, a month of readings, events, workshops, and general celebration of poetry and local poets. Join the festivities in April.

workshop!

WRITING SPRING, an online workshop with D.J. Lee, is still open for registration. The workshop will be held this Monday, March 25, 2024, 6:00-8:00pm Pacific. No previous poetry or writing experience is needed. See the Workshops page for more information about the workshop and D.J. Lee.

REGISTRATION is required and your fees benefit the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest: $30 per workshop.

workshops!

The Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest has three terrific two-hour workshops lined up for March. Two are in person, in Bellingham, one is on Zoom. Registration is required and all fees benefit the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest: $30 per workshop.

No previous poetry experience is required. Simply bring your favorite writing implements and an open mind.

TO REGISTER, click on the name of the workshop you wish to attend. It will take you to a registration page.
 
Saturday, March 9, 2024
4:00-6:00pm
Hannah Yerington
Magical Realism
in person at Faith Lutheran Church, Bellingham

Magic the mundane! This workshop will explore bringing fantastical and sometimes surreal elements into our poetry. Through exploring poems about talking plants, mystical animals, and strange happenings, we will generate new poetry that blurs the lines between reality and the imagination. Come ready to be delighted and open to seeing poetry as a portal to the unknown.

Hannah Yerington is an award-winning poet, Jewish Arts and Magic educator, creative writing teacher, and Director of the Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls. She is the author of Sheologies, a book of poems that invites the reader to personally engage in the ancient technologies of Jewish magic, prayer, and mystical text to local our present-day ancestors and create new rituals.
 

Saturday, March 16, 2024
2:00-4:00pm
Kami Westhoff
Beauty, Beasts, and the Banal
in person at Faith Lutheran Church, Bellingham

This workshop invites attendees to engage in dismantling perceptions of the unattractive, the uncelebrated, and the unremarkable to discover profound beauty. We will read poems that examine the cockroach, the vampire, the buttoning of a shirt, and the contents of a refrigerator, focusing on the ways in which their poets find reasons to celebrate each creature, action, and simple human behavior and through various writing prompts venture into creating our poems of exaltation.

Kami Westhoff is an award-winning writer, poet, and instructor of creative writing at Western Washington University. She received an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MA in Creative Writing from WWU. She is the author of the short story collection, The Criteria (Unsolicited Press), and three poetry chapbooks including Cloudbound, Sleepwalker, winner of Minerva Rising’s Dare to Be Contest, and Your Body a Bullet, co-written with Elizabeth Vignali. In her writing, she amplifies silenced voices and challenges systems that protect abusers.
 

Monday, March 25, 2024
6:00-8:00pm Pacific on Zoom
D.J. Lee
Writing Spring

In the “Writing Spring” workshop we will align our lyrical voices with the changing season, with the time in the Northern Hemisphere when the natural world revives, and when we likewise are revitalized after the dark winter months. Our teachers in this session will be seedlings sprouting from the ground, animals re-emerging from hibernation, and the new life quickening within us. Everyone welcome!

D.J. Lee is an acclaimed writer, teacher, and regents professor in the English Department at Washington State University. She holds an MFA and a Ph.D., and her prolific writing includes more than 50 published lyric essays and prose poems, the memoir Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots (Oregon State University Press), and eight scholarly books. A photographer and papermaker, Lee often combines image and text.

poets, submit!

ATTENTION Whatcom County poets of all ages and experience: the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest is now open! You are invited to send ONE poem for consideration by this year’s esteemed judges, Angela Belcaster and Ryler Dustin, between now and the submission deadline, Sunday, March 31, 2024.

Read (and follow!) (and download, if desired) the guidelines on the CONTEST page, then send in your very best poem.

Need some inspiration? Keep an eye on the WORKSHOPS page for details about three inspiring poetry workshops that will be offered in the next few weeks: March 9, 16, and 25, 2024.

planning for… National Poetry Month

Yes, it’s still February, but April will be here in a minute and there will be a plethora of delicious poetry on offer, so get out your calendar and start taking notes…

In Bellingham, Village Books is presenting the first Poetry Fest: a series of readings and workshops scheduled throughout the month. And of course poetry happens year-round at Village Books, so keep an eye on their Events page.

three days in October

The 7th Cascadia Poetry Festival is coming right up, Friday, October 6, through Sunday, October 8, 2023, at the Spring Street Center in Seattle. The list of featured poets is impressive and the schedule is packed. Registration is open.