The Only Constant
Emerging like so many Rip Van Winkles from pandemic protocols and pivots, quarantines, virtual meetings, national and global upheaval, how have we changed, how has our writing changed, how has what we are moved to write changed? Is it even possible to re-new? Or is “new”, by definition, something that didn’t exist before, can’t be re-upped? Let’s go with that. Let’s write the new, the change up. Let’s surface the new expression of the new questions. How now shall our writing intersect and reconnect in different ways with self and other? In this generative workshop we’ll use the lyric essay as the container for this exploration, a form that embraces hybridization and celebrates the vagaries of mixed genre.
High desert writer Ellen Waterston has published four poetry and three literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America Along the Oregon Desert Trail, a 2021 WILLA Finalist in creative nonfiction. Hotel Domilocos is her most recent collection of poetry. She serves on the faculty of Oregon State University Cascades’ Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing, is founder of the Writing Ranch, which conducts retreats for writers, and of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, recently adopted as a program of the High Desert Museum. She lives in central Oregon.
Learn more at: www.writingranch.com and www.highdesertmuseum.org