Deschutes Public Library partners with Caldera to bring dynamic writing workshops to Central Oregon.
Writing can be a lonely activity, but often times inspiration can come from working with a group. Caldera and Deschutes Public Library continue their partnership to bring dynamic writing workshops to Central Oregon.
Caldera hosts Artists in Residence (AiR) from across the country each winter, and Deschutes Public Library has long offered opportunities for the public to learn from writers and other artists.
“One of Caldera’s core values is embracing difference — both the differences among people and different ways of doing things,” says Maesie Speer, Caldera Arts Center programs manager. “Creative practice is one of the best ways to exercise that muscle of doing things differently. We hope these workshops will be a way for the community to tap into that spirit.”
Chantal Strobel, communications and development manager for Deschutes Public Library, says the partnership fits in perfectly with the Library’s expanding offerings for writers. “For nearly twenty years the library has offered workshops and events that give regional writers a chance to hone their craft while working with other aspiring authors,” Strobel says. “This partnership with Caldera gives us even more ways to serve our region’s robust writing community.”
Caldera AiR will host three workshops, one each at the Sisters Library, the Downtown Bend Library and the East Bend Library. All workshops are free and open to the public, however space is limited and advance registration is required. See individual URLs with each workshop to register.
Defying Expectations: Bringing the Funny to Fiction
Saturday, January 20 | 1-3pm | Downtown Bend Library, 601 NW Wall St.
More than ever, readers need a laugh. At its core, comedy is an art of defying expectations, and all writers, whether you’re interested in writing comedy or not, benefit from defying expectations. This course will deconstruct funny scenes and passages in recent fiction and use these examples as guides to help you bring the funny to your work and defy the expectations of your readers. This workshop is led by Leland Cheuk, a MacDowell Colony fellow and author of the novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong (CCLaP, 2015). His work has appeared in Salon, Catapult and Kenyon Review. Leland teaches fiction workshops at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute and the New York Writers Coalition.
Healthcare Comics: Educate, Heal and Connect Through Comics
Saturday, February 17 | 12-2pm | East Bend Library, 62080 Dean Swift Rd.
In this workshop, you will make your own one-page comic that highlights a medical experience that affected you as a patient, caregiver or medical professional. This workshop will help you tell your story, which can be a path towards personal healing, helping others understand a condition or showing a new perspective on a healthcare experience. This class is accessible to all skill levels since we will use simple shapes to create drawings and tell stories in our own voices. The first two hours will be workshop, and the last hour will be optional studio time for participants to continue working on their projects with support from the instructor. This workshop is led by Eroyn Franklin who has been making comics for the last decade and has written many short works and two graphic novels, Detained and Another Glorious Day at the Nothing Factory.
Devotional Writing
Saturday, March 17 | 12-2pm | Sisters Library, 110 N Cedar St.
In a time of competing crises and political chaos, it can be hard to know where to focus our attentions, how to steer our ship in a way that feels directed and clear. Our minds are so often fragmented, distracted, full of anxiety. In this evening with writer, artist and educator Leora Fridman, we’ll talk about Devotion — a word that has fallen out of fashion but that has a lot to teach us in this time. We’ll look specifically at devotion in writing, turning to examples of contemporary experimental writers including Laynie Browne and Rachel Zucker for writing exercises that give us examples of what it means to devote ourselves and, through writing, develop practices that help us devote ourselves more broadly, as opposed to tuning out and detaching. This workshop is led by Leora Fridman, a writer and educator, author of My Fault (Cleveland State University Press, 2016) in addition to five chapbooks. Her poems, prose and translations appear or are forthcoming in the Rumpus, Tricycle Magazine, Temporary Art Review, Open Space, Denver Quarterly, jubilat and jacket2.
calderaArts.org
deschuteslibrary.org