(Irene Cooper, Ellen Santasiero, and Mike Cooper founded The Forge Writing Program in 2021 | Photo courtesy of The Forge)
The Forge Creative Writing Program is accepting applications for its ten-month online course beginning September 2025. The program, now in its fourth year, is designed for people who want the rigor and community of a graduate creative writing program, but want an accelerated pace and lower cost.
“In our 40 combined years of teaching, we’ve encountered many writers who want to take themselves seriously and really live the writer’s life, but they don’t necessarily want or need an academic credential, or the high cost of a master’s program,” said Mike Cooper, who founded the program with fellow writers and teachers Irene Cooper and Ellen Santasiero. “We like to say that we got our MFAs so you don’t have to.”
Through bi-weekly workshops, individual mentorships, and feedback from instructors and peers, the program guides small cohorts of writers to generate writing, acquire and improve craft skills, and revise a body of work in fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry. A public reading/sharing of each writer’s work, in person or online, is a celebration of completion of the course.
The Forge graduated its first class of ten writers in October 2022.
To register for 2025: theforgewriting.com/contact More information: and free 15-minute conference: theforgewriting@gmail.com
About the Instructors
Ellen Santasiero is the author of Yes, you are a writer (2024). Her work has appeared in The Sun, BULL Men’s Fiction, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Northwest Review, Oregon Humanities, High Desert Journal, and in Going Green, an anthology from the University of Oklahoma Press. She taught literature and writing at Oregon State University-Cascades from 2007-2021, and memoir writing at The Bend Writers Workshop in 2019-20. In 2023, she was a featured poet at an ekphrastic reading at the Hyde Museum in Glens Falls, New York. With Irene Cooper she co-edited PLACED: An Encyclopedia of Central Oregon, Vol. 1, and she is the editor of Just Say “Yes” to Life: Stories of Surviving After Stroke. Ellen lives on the edge of Adirondack Park in upstate New York. ellensantasiero.com
Irene Cooper is the author of the psychological thriller FOUND (2022), winner of the North Street Prize; COMMITTAL, poet-friendly spy-fy about family (2020); the poetry collection spare change (2021), finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award; and, with Ellen Santasiero, co-edited Placed: An Encyclopedia of Central Oregon. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, Beloit, & elsewhere. Irene supports AIC-directed writing at a regional prison, teaches in community, and currently serves as an editor for Airlie Press. Her new collection, even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety will be published in September 2024. She lives with her people in the middle of Oregon. Learn more at irenecooperwrites.com
Mike Cooper holds an MFA from Oregon State University Cascades in Bend, Oregon where he lives with his family. His short story “Call Me When You Get There” was published in The Baltimore Review winter ’24 issue and he has been a finalist in Glimmer Train, The Lascaux Review, Driftwood Press, and Cutthroat. He is president of the Central Oregon Writers Guild and teaches writing at Central Oregon Community College and Oregon State University Cascades (undergraduate and in the MFA Program), as well as creative writing workshops through Blank Pages Workshops and The Forge, and at the Deschutes Public Library, COCC Community Learning, and Deer Ridge Correctional Institute.