Cheryl Strayed will be teaching a fiction workshop at this summer's Conference. The author of the critically acclaimed novel "Torch,"–selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books by Pacific Northwest writers–Strayed's stories and essays have appeared in over a dozen magazines, journals, and anthologies, including twice in the Best American Essays anthology.

Class Description: The Story You Have to Tell
What’s the story you’re burning to tell? It this workshop we’ll go where the heat is by writing the stories that most compel you as a writer—not the stories you think you should tell or that your Aunt Edna would like to read or the stories you believe will become New York Times bestsellers. Our focus will be on the story that, for better or worse, keeps insisting on being told. We’ll talk about how to find stories and how to write them. We’ll examine sentences and scenes and structure. We’ll delve into the less definable elements of writing—things like the role of intuition, emotional risk-taking, and what David Foster Wallace called “the agenda of the consciousness behind the text.” Most of all, we’ll write every day so that by the end of the week at least some of the story you have to tell will be on the page.