We’ve got a full slate of upcoming workshops in 2012–and some of them are already completely full!

Our first workshop will be a completely immersive long weekend with veteran writing teachers Sheila Bender and Meg Files June 14-17. The schedule is here. This workshop is designed for creative nonfiction writers who want be pushed in their work.

In July, we’re going to be trying something we’ve never done before: the 2012 Port Townsend Writers’ Conference will, for the first time, go for two weeks. The first session will be July 8-15, and the second session will be July 15-22. Participants come for just the first week, just the second week, or–for those who want deep immersion into the writing life to make radical transformations in their writing–both weeks.

And, a yet another option, for those of you who write short fiction, Sam Ligon will be leading a four-day intensive workshop in fiction writing July 12-15.

Ligon is the author of the short-story collection “Drift and Swerve” and the novel “Safe in Heaven Dead.” His stories have appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and New England  Review. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and is the editor of Willow Springs.

Class Description:
“Flash-fiction Boot Camp: Three Days, Three Stories.”
In the anthology Sudden Fiction, Robert Kelly refers to short-short fiction as “the insidious, sudden, alarming, stabbing, tantalizing, annihilating form… neither poetic prose nor prosy verse, but the energy and clarity typical of prose coincident in the scope and rhythm of the poem.” In the same anthology, Joyce Carol Oates writes that “[v]ery short fictions are nearly always experimental, exquisitely calibrated, reminiscent of Frost’s definition of a poem—a structure of words that consumes itself as it unfolds, like ice melting on a stove.” Very short fictions tend to rely on surprise, a hard turn at the end. They’re often elliptical or fragmented, and often shaped by tone and shadow. In this workshop, we’ll be exploring compression and limitation, evocation and implication, formal constraint and what might arise from line pressure and narrative restriction. We’ll  immerse ourselves in a fever of flash fiction reading and writing, composing and workshopping three short-short stories in three days, an intensive in the annihilating form. Register.