OPN Scheduled Workshops

Workshops / Scheduled Special Events

Upcoming Workshops

NOTICE:
​Due to the social distancing policies that need
to remain in place to keep everyone as healthy as possible,
the Workshop with Nathalia Kuroiwa-Lewis
​has been postponed until further notice.

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Poetry Workshop “Adventures With Mortals, Magic And Gods”
with OPN Board Member Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis

​<<<<<POSTPONED>>>>>

Join me in an exciting journey writing poems inspired by Greek mythology.  Here, we'll see how objects of magic and well-known stories passed down through time can serve as powerful tools for crafting poetry.  We'll examine how poets such as Rita Dove and Margaret Atwood, among others, draw on age-old stories of the cultural imagination to create spell-binding characters caught in unique situations in perilous times.  Using prompts, we'll generate new poems with dramatic flair.  No knowledge of Greek myth required, just a love for iconic stories!  Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis will lead the workshop. It is scheduled for Tuesday, April 14th from 7:00-9:00 at the Olympia Community Center at 222 Columbia St. NW, Olympia, WA 98501.


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PAST WORKSHOPS

Tuesday, February 11
Love & Sex & Poetry
with 
Suzanne Simons

​OPN’s winter/spring workshop series opens with a valentine’s special on Tuesday, February 11 when Suzanne Simons leads a session titled “Love & Sex & Poetry.”  The workshop will be held at the Olympia Community Center, 222 Columbia St. NW from 7:00 p.m. until 8:30 p.m.  Put on your writing hat and head down to “explore love poems of various kinds, from sweet to silly to sensuous.”  Suzanne says that “We’ll consider poems by Khalil Gibran, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Bob Hickok, and others, and try our hands at new ways to craft love poems using fresh language and form.”  Come prepared to write.  The event is FREE but donations are appreciated.
 
     About SUZANNE SIMONS:  Suzanne is a faculty member at The Evergreen State College where she teaches poetry and interdisciplinary studies.  Poetry helps her make sense of life by bringing beauty and order to chaos.  She is inspired by the rhythms of nature, the music of language, and the grace notes of the every day.

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"HANDS ON" 
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a critique workshop with award-winning Oregon poet
CLEMENS STARCK
– ​scroll down to register –
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Limit 15 people

10:30am until 1:30pm, Thursday, Jan. 16 in Room 205 of The Olympia Center, 222 Columbia St. NW, Olympia
(bring a sack lunch)

This workshop follows a reading for OPN (open to the public) at New Traditions Cafe' the previous evening (6:00-8:00pm)

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SADY SPARKS, Olympia's Poet Laureate
Oct. 8th, Tuesday, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm 
Olympia Community Center,
222 Columbia St. NW, Olympia.

Join Olympia's Poet Laureate Sady Sparks as we explore sound, color, and the poetry in each moment. Sady uses erasure poems, prompts, stop watches, and markers to encourage poetry from the mundane. This is for those who love words, detest words, and don't know what to do with words. Bring your excitement, your dread, your teenager, your water bottle. LGBTQ+ friendly. Ages 10-110. 

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The Continuous Now: Generating Systems, Series, and Sequences of “Buttons”

​with Tristan Beach, Lecturer in English at Saint Martin's University
      7 to 9 pm
Olympia Community Center, 
 222 Columbia St NW, Olympia, WA 98501
 Sept. 10, Tuesday

As poets, we are often compelled to examine our relationships to language and our positions as observers of the ordinary world. In this generative hybrid poetry workshop, inspired by Dana Levin’s workshops on Poetry and the Unconscious, we will create sequences of prose/poems that embody and exemplify this questioning. Guided by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, we will capture in language portraits—impressions and associations—the objects, activities, and ideas that populate our daily lives, crafting our own “buttons” in what Stein calls the “continuous now.” To help generate these “buttons,” we will replicate diagrams, litanies, random Tarot card draws, the physical space of the workshop, the human anatomy, whatever is in your closet, a screenshot of phone apps, and other real systems, series, and sequences of objects. We invite you to bring receipts, grocery lists, a snapshot of your car’s dashboard, or whatever composition strikes a creative spark in you. Join us in creating odd, wonderful artifacts of language.

Tristan Beach has taught English across China from 2014 to 2017. Before that, he was a long-time editor for Portland-based literary journal Conium Review and was involved with various other literary journals and presses, including Copper Canyon Press, Coffee House Press, Pitkin Review, and Clockhouse. His poems, prose, and criticism appear in Pif Magazine, Shantih, rawboned, The Writer in the World, and Pitkin Review. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and currently teaches English at Saint Martin’s University; he is also a facilitator for Writing on Water and the poetry editor for Pif Magazine.

THIS WORKSHOP IS FULL.
To get on a waiting list, please email us.

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​RECENT WORKSHOPS

​DONNING A MASK: ​THE PERSONA POEM
A Workshop with Peter Ludwin

Tuesday, April 9, 2019
 7 -9 pm
Olympia Community Center
downtown Olympia

We'll go over what a persona poem is, the various attributes and characteristics of a persona poem, read some outstanding examples, write one ourselves and then read them to the group.

WRITING WITH THE GREEKS
A Workshop with OPN Board Member
​Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis

Tuesday, March 12, 2019
7 - 9 pm
Olympia Community Center
​downtown Olympia

Join me in an exciting journey writing with the Greeks.  Here we'll study connections between Carl Jung's theory of archetype and Greek myth in poetry.  We'll see how poets such as Lucille Clifton and Lucia Perillo, among others, play with perspective in Greek myth when they write their poems. We'll use prompts to generate new poems with Greek myth. Participants are encouraged to bring their favorite myths with them.