Gary Copeland Lilley

Gary Copeland Lilley is an award-winning poet and educator with a strong background in Southern American culture, blues poetry, and storytelling. He has published several collections of poetry and is renowned for his ability to bring raw emotion and narrative depth to his work. As Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers Conference, Gary selects faculty who challenge and inspire writers to explore the full range of their creative voices.

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Registration for a morning intensive workshop includes a writing workshop from 9:00 to 11:30 a.m. July 14-16th, 18th and 19th (5 sessions with 1 break day in between). Your morning workshop will include the same cohort of up to 14 of your peer writers throughout the week who are all led by a faculty member of your choosing when you register for the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Morning Workshops also include access to all afternoon and evening programming, including craft lectures, afternoon workshops, evening faculty readings, open mics, and social gatherings at Fort Worden State Park. 

Please note: Morning workshops are in-person only and capped at 14 people per workshop. If you do not see a workshop listed here available when you register, it is full.

2025 Morning Workshops

Bryce Andrews - Awful, Beautiful “I” (Narrative Nonfiction) 

This workshop is about telling stories from the raw materials of life, in the first person. In other words, God help us, it is about memoir. Perhaps you have a complicated relationship with the genre and its inevitable pronoun, considering one the province and the other a hallmark of navel-gazing egotism. You’re not completely wrong.  

The workshop, however, pursues a breed of memoir that looks through, as much as into, the author’s life. It is about finding an essential story in the run of days and recognizing one’s own experience as a lens that can be turned, unflinchingly and searingly, on the larger world. Memoir as commentary, warning, revelation, or antidote.  

We will read Chatwin, Didion, St. Exupéry, Baldwin, and other relevant lights. There will be prompts, feedback, short-form exercises, reading aloud, and other fine things one might expect from a writing workshop. Over the week’s course, each participant will identify, refine, and draft a short story from their life.  

Reginald Dwayne Betts – The Art of Juxtaposition (Poetry) 

Juxtaposition is often understood as simply placing one thing next to another. However, for poets and novelists, it can be much more—a powerful tool to reimagine landscapes of meaning and deepen understanding. This workshop explores how juxtaposition can generate radical dissonance, creating layers of texture, rhythm, sound, and complexity in your work. 

We’ll dive into the mechanics of juxtaposition and its connection to figures of speech, the heart of poetic expression. Through discussion, analysis, and exercises, participants will learn how to harness these techniques to elevate their craft. 

Our reference texts include Figures of Speech by Arthur Quinn, as well as works by poets such as Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, Aracelis Girmay, John Murillo, Etheridge Knight, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Natalie Diaz, and others.

Debra Magpie Earline - The Living Creature: Storytelling and Fiction 

“A story is a living creature with its own destiny and my job is to allow it to tell itself.”

Isabelle Allende

How do we “allow” stories to tell themselves? Can our personal histories take us into unknown realms and provide new and meaningful envisioning[s]? In this generative class, we will begin by looking at the quiet stories in your own lives that can shed distinctive light on your writerly work. What moves readers? What grips them? What makes them sigh in wonder? Through guided exercises we will share glimpse memories that can provide rare, and sometimes uncanny, insights that will help shape your work. We will move outward into community and regional stories to find not only the arc of stories but the finer details that bring fiction to life. We will tell stories. We will listen to stories. We will write stories. We will discover renewed momentum in our writing. Even if you’re not an oral storyteller take a chance. You might surprise yourself with the “living creature” inside you waiting to be released. 

Trigger warning: Please be aware some stories told in the class might be disturbing. Be prepared.

Tess Gallagher - The Moment: Beginnings and Endings (Poetry)  

This is a generative workshop.  During the first three days of our class, we will explore (through writing prompts I will provide) a variety of examples of beginnings and endings, taken from my poems and those of others. You will write during our time, and we will discuss these poems.   Then, in the remaining two days of the class, we will work at revising our generated poems. 

All poems begin in, with and from a moment in time. We will explore this moment of origin—the impulse to begin an utterance, a safari in language through time.  Each time we answer that impulse, we honor the whole notion of poetry which is to receive the unknown and the unknowable, and with our imaginations to create an arena made of sound that is embodied emotion, delight, pain, intellect, questions and a good amount of imbedded silence, out of which all poems arise.  

Eventually we come to the moment of closure – perhaps a closure which is also an opening.  The poem goes along, and it meets its changes.  When it comes to that final moment, this is the real stringency–because this last moment is attached to memory, as the first moment is not. The ending extends the poem into the future if its cargo, any substantive part of it, remains in the readers’ memory after they have left the poem.   

I have developed some strategies to avoid ending your poems in any usual way. Hopefully this will be of help to you in considering how your own poems begin and end.   

"The moment is not just time. It is a cup of blessing in Gallagher’s poetry. It is a vessel into which she pours the past and the future. Tess Gallagher’s poems never leave the moment. Open any of her books and you never leave the moment."

Harold Schweizer from his essay Tess Gallagher: The Poet of Eternity forthcoming in The American Poetry Review

Terrance Hayes - New Shadows: READING TO WRITE (Poetry) 

This workshop will offer concrete strategies for writing when the only teacher available is a book. We will explore the ways “reading to write” can result in new poems. During the week we will look at how an assortment of poems "shadow," imitate, and are in conversation with other poems and other forms (music, film, journalism). Most importantly, inventive imitations and transformations will be generated in response to the reading. Portions of work generated in the course will be shared and workshopped. 

Tess Hulls - Exploring the Borders of Graphic Narrative 

Comics combine words and images, but this workshop takes the idea of hybridity a step further to ask: what other forms can we draw from to inform how we make comics? Students need no prior experience in graphic narrative for this workshop; the only prerequisite is a desire to experiment and push the boundaries of genre.  

Getting our hands dirty, we’ll use analog materials of pen, pencil, and color on paper, (though students are welcome to augment this by bringing iPads if they work digitally) to learn how to weave unexpected inspirations into graphic narratives to create works rich with surprise and deep emotional resonance. We’ll study comics artists such as Thi Bui, David B, Lee Lai, Nora Krug, Alison Bechdel, Christophe Chabouté, and Eleanor Davis— but we’ll also draw from poetry, visual art, cartography, somatics, and the works of genre-spanning creatives like Shing Yin Kor, Sophie Calle, and Twyla Tharp. 

While the goal of this workshop is not to generate completed works, students will come away with the starting points of new comics that will push them to explore graphic narrative in fresh, innovative ways. 

Toni Jensen - Writing Toward Balance in Narrative Nonfiction 

What does it mean to blend our own stories with those of others? What does it mean to incorporate research or contemporary events into the stories of our lives? How do we work to balance our stories with others’ stories or with research? In this nonfiction workshop, we’ll wrestle with these questions of balance, find some answers, do some generative writing, and read and discuss each other’s work. Narrative nonfiction tells a true story or stories, using fictional techniques, and encompasses memoir, personal essays, narrative journalism and many other forms. 

Claudia Castro Luna - East/West/North/South. Este Oeste Norte Sur. Spirit, Nature, and the Voice Within (Poetry) 

In this generative class we’ll use the four directions as a framework for guiding our writerly inquiries and writing practice. Emily Dickinson warns of forgetting “[Our] own locality.” Heeding her warning, we’ll focus on our individual locations and write into the north, into the south, into the east and west of our lives. We know more than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. Our quotidian doings can be source and offering. Spirit, nature, mystery, are always near if we are present to them and willing to listen. Craft-wise we’ll work with line, image, voice, and form—craft elements in service of the voice within—not the other way around. Poetry is everywhere and before language. Robert Bringhurst notes, “Everywhere being is dancing.” We’ll dance, listen to nature and each other, read indigenous poets from Chile to Canada, share in community, and write, write, write. 

Valerie Miner - Spirit of Place (Prose – Fiction and Nonfiction)

“Those dark Arkansas roads, that is the sound I am after.” 

Miles Davis 

This narrative workshop is for non-fiction and fiction writers.  It calls upon an imaginative interpretation of geographical locale, social context and historical moment.  We will focus on a significant element of fiction and memoir--the spirit of place.  We approach setting from several vantage points, paying attention to atmosphere, sensual experiences, and narrative time.  We’ll consider the differences between “home” and “away” in our writing, the tensions between exploration and trespassing, the resonance of ancestral place. 

“Place” is a verb as well as a noun.  Participants will deal with dialect, music, the angle of the sun, moisture in the air, cultural traditions, whispers of the spirit.  Setting is action and being and states of being.  Artistic prose is just as musical as poetry and we will be attending to the rhythm of one word breathing against another.  We will listen as we write. 

The workshop will include lectures, discussions, exercises and critiques.  We’ll be considering published work by a diverse range of authors as well as the participants’ manuscripts.  Attending to the subjects, themes, audiences and forms of the participants’ fiction and memoirs, we will offer supportive, constructive feedback.  We will concentrate on finding our own voices and styles while developing craft skills that will carry those voices into a larger world.   

The workshop format is organized but flexible.  Participants are encouraged to bring titles of books of fiction and memoirs they would like to recommend so we will build a bibliography that will take us beyond the conference. 

2025 Morning Faculty Craft Lectures

Bryce Andrews - Up All Night with Great Ideas: Early Parenthood, the Writing Life, and the Tattered Limits of Sanity.

Debra Earling - Informant Ghosts of History

Reginald Dwayne Betts - The Art of Juxtaposition

Tess Gallagher - The Poem As Time Machine

Terrance Hayes - Interaction Poem Making

Tessa Hulls - One River, Many Braids: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Toni Jensen - Returning to the Well: The Regenerative Power of Favorite Texts

Claudia Castro Luna - Let me count the ways: The list as architecture and rhetorical device.

Valerie Miner - Finding the Shapes of Our Stories: Story, Novella, or Novel?

Anna Quinn – Echoes from the Outside: The Interplay of Exteriority and Interiority

Registering for afternoon workshops includes access to all afternoon and evening programming at the Port Townsend Writers Conference, including craft lectures, afternoon workshops, evening faculty readings, open mics, and social gatherings at Fort Worden State Park. Registering for a morning intensive workshop (see above) also includes access to afternoon and evening programming in addition to the morning intensive workshop. Please note, registering for afternoons only does not include access to a morning intensive workshop.

2025 Afternoon Workshop Offerings Coming Soon!

Centrum has a variety of ways to be able to attend our workshops even if you’re on a budget. If you need financial assistance, Centrum has a robust scholarship program awarded on a first-come, first-served; and as-needed basis. 

Please note, housing and meal costs reflect the Conference's extension to seven days in 2025. 

Tuition:

Morning Intensive Workshop: $1,050
Afternoons Only: $650
First Impression 1-on-1 Writing Consultation with an Editor: $80

Those who register for the Morning Intensive Workshop get access to their choice of a morning faculty member as well as access to all drop-in afternoon workshops.  Morning faculty classes are limited to 14 people and registration fills quickly.

Housing:

Private Dorm Room (7 nights): $575
Private Dorm Room with a View (7 nights): $675
Shared Apartment (7 nights): $1,085

Meals:

All meals: $475

Transportation:

Shuttle from Seatac 7/13: $65
Shuttle to Seatac 7/20: $65

Scholarships

Apply online as you register. Please note that except in rare cases, scholarships are available for tuition only, not housing and meals. Centrum requires a $50 deposit of scholarship applicants, which is fully refundable if you do not receive a scholarship and choose not to attend the conference. 

If we haven’t answered all of the questions you may have, please contact Eric Greenwell at 360-385-3102, x131, or egreenwell@centrum (dot) org.

Is financial assistance available to attend the Port Townsend Writers Conference?

Yes! Centrum is proud to offer a limited number of scholarships. We accept scholarship applications when registration for the Port Townsend Writers Conference opens on January 2 through April 15, prior to the Conference in July. Applications are evaluated by an anonymous scholarship judge on a first come, first served bases and on a rolling schedule throughout the application period. Should Centrum not exhaust our scholarship funding by April 15, the application period will remain open until all funds are committed. Apply online as you register. 

Please note that except in rare cases, scholarships are available for tuition only. This does not include travel, housing, and meals. Applicants should be prepared to cover these expenses. Centrum requires a $50 deposit of scholarship applicants at the time of application, which is fully refundable if you do not receive a scholarship and choose not to attend the Conference. 

I registered for a morning intensive workshop. Can I attend a craft lecture or afternoon workshop? What about a faculty reading?

Yes! Registration for a morning intensive workshop includes access to all afternoon and evening programming as well, including craft lectures, afternoon workshops, evening faculty readings, open mics, and social gatherings through the week. In short, if you register for a morning intensive workshop, you have access to everything on the schedule for the Conference.

I registered for afternoons only. Can I attend a morning workshop too?

Not unless you change your registration to a morning intensive workshop. Morning intensives are limited to 14 writers who meet daily throughout the week with the same faculty member. To attend a morning intensive workshop, you must register for that workshop, which includes access to all afternoon and evening programming during the Conference as well. As an afternoon participant, you still have access to all the great programming in the afternoons and evenings, including craft lectures, afternoon workshops, evening faculty readings, open mics, and social gatherings. If you would like to change your registration to a morning workshop - and spots are still available in that workshop - you do so through the registration confirmation email you received or you can contact Centrum's Registrar at (360) 385-3102.

I want to share my work at the Conference. How can I do that?

We're so glad you asked! At the Port Townsend Writers Conference, one of our goals is to foster a community of writers. While writing can often be solitary in practice - as in, the act itself - there's a whole community of people out there experiencing similar challenges. At the Conference, we have open mics every evening, and anyone who registers (morning and afternoons) can come and sign up. Workshops are often generative as well and include many opportunities to share your work with the work of your peers. If you have books, we have a pop-up bookstore every year where you can sell them, and you will receive more information after you register about how to include your books for sale. Finally, Fort Worden is a big campus with lots of open spaces to walk with the writers you meet and share thoughts, experiences, and ideas while passing through Pacific madrone forests or looking across the Salish Sea. 

Do I have to register for meals and lodging at Fort Worden for the Conference too?

In short, no. You can register for a morning intensive workshop or afternoon programming only without registering for meals and lodging. However, there are important things to consider. Grocery stores and restaurants are not easily accessible from Fort Worden if you do not have a personal vehicle on campus. Downtown Port Townsend and most grocery stores, hotels, and short-term rentals are a 10-minute drive from our campus at Fort Worden State Park, and Centrum is not staffed to provide shuttle service for individual participants to and from town during the Conference. If you choose to stay off campus and/or prepare your own meals, you will want to plan accordingly. Also note, many deep connections and inspiring conversations happen over meals or walking around campus, and participants often sign up for meals because they are conveniently located on campus, just a quick walk from workshops, and because they eat with their peers and faculty, forming stronger bonds as the week progresses. Also note, Fort Worden sits right on the shore of the Salish Sea, and lodging on campus is not only a quick walk from workshops, but also located in an inspiring place with stunning views of the open water, Mount Baker, and Mount Rainier, and campus grounds include about 12 miles of hiking trails.

I want to sign up for a First Impressions Writing Sample Consultation. What can I expect?

A First Impression is yet another opportunity to share your work and receive 1-on-1 feedback from an experienced editor and writing teacher  during the Conference. Here's how it works: After you sign up for a First Impression, you will receive information prior to the Conference to schedule your time with our Editing Faculty member, Elizabeth Thorpe. You and Elizabeth will have an hour to work together. You can look at whatever sample of your writing you bring to her during that hour. Elizabeth will often ask about your goals and intentions, read your sample with your goals in mind, and then discuss the sample with you. How does this help you? Editors and agents often look at work quickly and make snap decisions in a matter of pages. For example, in the initial stages of selecting a poetry manuscript for publication, editors often read the first five and last five poems before deciding whether to advance or reject it. It can be helpful for you to have insight into how your work might impact a reader quickly, like an editor or agent, who knows very little about you or your work. Previous participants have found this “mirror” - truly a first impression - very useful. But the goal is always to meet each writer where they are and try to be as productive as possible within the one-hour session. You might want to ask questions about the editing and publishing landscape more than talk about your writing, for example, or you may want a more in-depth critique of your writing sample. It's your hour of Elizabeth's time and attention. If you do want an in-depth critique, you should plan to give Elizabeth a brief sample of your work so you can spend time really discussing what's happening in that sample.

Do I have to go to everything during the Conference week?

The short answer is, no. In fact, we've often seen writers become overwhelmed when they try to attend everything during the Conference. We recommend thinking about your goals. What do you want to get out of the experience? For example, if your goal is to meet as many writers as possible, including faculty and peers, you might want to plan to attend as many workshops, lectures, evening readings, and open mics as you can, and if you are naturally introverted or drained by extended social interaction, you might consider how much energy such a level of activity might require. If your goal is to advance a piece of writing, on the other hand, you might want to build in time to write and balance that writing time with other activities and programming during the week. Maybe you also want to see Port Townsend and spend time hiking Fort Worden. In 2025, we are returning to a seven-day schedule (as compared to a six-day schedule in recent years). The additional day will allow us to build in time for you to experience Fort Worden's unique and naturally-rich campus and each other's company. As Centrum's mission states, our goal is creativity and community. We have learned after organizing arts programs for over 50 years, finding the harmony between creativity and community means connecting writers with writers and writers with themselves, and we encourage our writing community to do so for the brief and indelible time we are all together in a beautiful place.

Can I register for the 2025 Port Townsend Writers Conference remotely and attend online?

The Covid-19 Pandemic challenged our writing community in many ways, and providing the opportunity to attend the Conference online was one way we were able to meet and share our work and continue our legacy of creative and community. Our production crew here at Centrum has done a remarkable job providing a platform for online engagement. In the years since the Pandemic, however, as we have returned to hosting the Conference in person at Fort Worden, we have seen interest in attending online decline significantly, from about 40 participants in 2022 to just 3 in 2024, when we cancelled the online option. There are no plans to offer online remote attendance in 2025. Thank you for supporting our community and engaging each other through the Pandemic, which was a challenge our community rose to and remains a testament to its import and strength.  

For questions about how to get to Fort Worden State Park, food service for on-campus meals, what to bring, and what to expect of Port Townsend and the area, you can also visit Centrum's general FAQ page by clicking here. 

If we haven’t answered all of the questions you may have, please contact Eric Greenwell at 360-385-3102, x131, or egreenwell@centrum (dot) org.

Find more answers - Centrum FAQs

Below is a general outline of how you can spend your time during the Port Townsend Writers Conference, depending upon what you register to attend.

The schedule below includes when morning intensive workshops, afternoon drop-in workshops, craft lectures, open mics, and evening gatherings occur. Specifics, including the titles of workshops and their locations on campus, will be sent after registration and prior to your arrival on campus.

Please note, all times are Pacific Standard Time.

Sunday, July 13

2 p.m. - Centrum Shuttle leaves SeaTac Airport headed to Fort Worden*

4-5 p.m. - Arrival at Fort Worden State Park, Check In, and Welcome Reception                 

5:15 p.m. - Dinner**

7 p.m. - Welcome Orientation

7:30 p.m. - Faculty Reading

Monday - Wednesday, July 14-16, and Friday-Saturday, July 18-19

7:45 a.m. - Breakfast**

9-11:30 a.m. - Morning Intensive Workshops

11:45 a.m. - Lunch**

1-1:50 p.m. - Afternoon Craft Lectures

2-3:15 p.m. - Afternoon Drop-In Workshops

5:45 p.m. - Dinner**

7 p.m. - Evening faculty readings

Directly following faculty readings - PTWC Open Mic

Thursday, July 17th

7:45 a.m. - Breakfast**

9-11 a.m. Optional Fort Worden Group Hike

11:45 a.m. - Lunch**

1 p.m. - Optional Writers Wiffle Ball

5:45 p.m. - Dinner**

7 p.m. - Evening faculty Readings

Directly following faculty reading - Evening social gathering (TBA)

Sunday, July 20^th

7:45 a.m. - Breakfast

9 a.m. - Centrum Shuttle Departs Fort Worden headed to SeaTac Airport**

11 a.m. - Fort Worden Checkout***

*For those who register for the Centrum Shuttle from SeaTac International Airport in Seattle to and/or from Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington

**For those who register for meals on campus

***For those who register for lodging on campus