6th Annual Let's Write!

6th Annual Let's Write Event: Bridging the Gap
Saturday September 28, 2024 from 9am-5pm at the Guild
24353 Redwood Highway Kerby, OR 97531
Registration Fee: $45-$65 Sliding Scale • Ages 18+

The Southern Oregon Guild presents the 6th Annual “Let’s Write!” Event – A Day of Writing for All Kinds of Writers! This year's theme is: Bridging the Gap. Join 6 local writers on Saturday September 28 at the Guild Gallery & Art Center, for a series of interactive workshops aimed to actively inspire your own literary practice!

The 2024 Keynote Speaker will be Michael Franklin, poet, spoken-word performer, musician, and Illinois Valley resident for the past decade. He is currently the program director and co-founder of Journey Home, a local multidimensional project of Death Midwifery, Conscious Living and Dying, Recovery, Grieving, and Community Connection. In his opening keynote address, Michael will pull from his work as a mindfulness facilitator, discussing what it means to be a bridge and explore telling our stories from a place of nonduality towards oneness. In addition to his keynote, Michael Franklin will be presenting his workshop “Oratory: Poetry & The Oral tradition reimagined with technology."

Following the keynote address at 9:30am, there will be three 90-minute sessions, each with a choice of two separate workshops, for a total of six different presentations. Facilitators will provide support while guiding attendees to create their own fresh writing. All presenters and workshops are described below. The day will conclude with a wrap-up session at 4pm, in which participants can share feedback and network with one another. Coffee, Lunch, Snacks, and Refreshments are all included. Lunch (11:30-12:30) will include a buffet-style salad bar with many options to accomodate multiple food preferences. Event Fees are on a sliding scale from $45 to $65. Full, Partial, and Work-Trade Scholarships are available and can be applied for HERE. This event is open to ages 18+ Please honestly self-select your payment tier based on your financial picture. For event questions, please call 541-592-5019 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Poetry Workshops

10AM: Bridges & Boundaries: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Laurel Winter. Includes 1/3 presentation, 1/3 writing, and 1/3 sharing. Who are you talking to & why? Preaching to the choir? Browbeating the “idiots” with facts? (This never works, for so many reasons.) We’ll explore detours, castles & moats, when to burn a bridge—or temporarily close it. Using bridges as metaphors, we’ll let poetry help us find the way.

12:30PM: Oratory: Poetry & The Oral tradition reimagined with technology with Michael Franklin. A workshop on “writing” without writing! In this workshop, Michael will discuss the long history of oral tradition in poetry. Poetry is pre-literate. All storytelling began as an audible practice, allotting the work with a certain fluidity that embraced and created the culture, incorporated the land base, and expanded the language. Let us utilize the moment in time as a factor in its inception and reincarnation. Word began first as the sound, the vibration in your chest; the control of the breath, and the movement of your tongue. Composition in this way is music. It comes from a different place, outside of the distrustful mind, and opens itself to the vulnerability of now. Come together as we explore “automatic composition” using the zen practice of “First Thought, Best Thought” with a sprinkle of modern technology in the deal. Let’s see how our poetry changes when it is undammed and free-flowing.

2:15PM: Finding the Words: A Generative Blackout Poetry Workshop with Jennifer Rood. Blackout poetry bridges a gap between discovery and creation, and invites you to engage in both receptive and active thinking in an exciting and satisfying way. In this workshop, you will learn about and practice methods for creating blackout poetry, and will walk away with an appreciation of how blackout can be used to move past writer's block or simply enjoyed in its own right.

Prose & Exploratory Workshops

10AM: Point of View Workshop Building the Bridge That Connects Reader to Character with Shelly King Schuur. Point of view is often overlooked as a creative approach to developing engaging characters and even solving roadblocks writers may have. In this workshop, we will take a look at first person, third person close, and third person omniscient POVs exploring both strengths and drawbacks of each. We’ll also visit the mysterious narrator and the little used second person POV. Writers are encouraged to bring a few sentences of a work-in-progress or even of a story that they love. We will have several exercises where writers will play with changing the point of view of their sentences to see what happens.

12:30PM: From Micro to Macro: Bridging the Gap Between an Initial Idea and a Fully Developed Story with Barry Vitcov. Writers will create stories beginning with a piece of micro fiction, typically stories less than 100 words, before planning and developing a longer short story. Participants will actively engage with one another by sharing their writing processes.

2:15PM: From Page to Stage, A Playwriting Workshop with Jay Eklond. Bridge the gap between your writing skills and theater as playwright Jay Eklond leads you through the process of creating a 10-minute play! 10 minute plays are easy to produce, popular, and 10 minute play festivals are always looking for submissions. Jay will share a short reading from one of his 10-minute ZIP Code plays he produced in Nashville, TN and then devote time so that you can begin writing scenes for your own play. There will be an opportunity to share and explore creating a playwriting group to produce future plays at the Guild or other local venues. Jay is available to assist class participants with their plays after class, either 1:1 or in follow-up groups at the Guild.

Presenter Bios

Micheal Franklin was born in northern Appalachia small-town Ohio, where he was first introduced to poetry in the softball diamonds and Moose lodges of middle America. He has published multiple works of poetry and toured the country as a spoken-word performer and musician for the past three decades. He is the program director and co-founder of Journey Home, a multidimensional project of Death Midwifery, Conscious Living and Dying, Recovery, Mindfulness, Grieving, and Community Connection. He has drank the water and breathed the air of the Illinois River Valley for a decade, and tries to say thank you every day, but sometimes forgets.

Shelly King Schuur's short fiction has appeared in the GW Review, Epiphany, Slow Trains, the Dos Passos Review, and the Coe Review, Palo Alto Weekly, and The Writer magazine. She is the author of the novel The Moment of Everything (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette) which has been translated to a dozen languages around the world. She has taught numerous workshops and classes for the California Writers Club, Cabrillo College, and other private organizations. She is the co-founder and teacher of the newly-formed local nonprofit, Rogue Writers Collective, in Grants Pass, OR. You can learn more about the Rogue Writers Collective HERE.

Jay Eklond is a playwright and Guild Member based right here in Cave Junction, OR. His plays have been produced from Seattle Washington, (population 730,000) to Mooresville, AL, (population 73), along with three cities in Tennessee, three in Kentucky, and at the University of Notre Dame. His plays have been performed in libraries, museums, art galleries, seminars, state parks, bars, music venues, a president’s boyhood home, colleges, the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, several theater venues, and on a flatbed truck during the Jessie James Festival in Whites Creek, Tennessee. In addition to the Jessie James Festival, Mr. Eklond has two other plays produced annually at other historic sites. Jay is a proud member of DGA, and the Senior Research & Playwright Author for the Tennessee Stage & Film Co., a registered non-profit corporation with the principle mission of "Taking History to the Stage.”

Barry Vitcov is a retired educator having spent 45 years as a middle school English teacher, school administrator, leadership coach, and adjunct university professor. He lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife and exceptionally brilliant standard poodle. He has had fiction and poetry published in EAP: The Magazine, Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Vita Brevis, Finding the Birds, Cobra Lily, and The Drabble. Finishing Line Press (FLP) has published three of his books: a poetry collection Where I Live Some of the Time (2021), a collection of short stories The Wilbur Stories & More (2022), and a poetry chapbook Structures (2024). A novella The Boy with Six Fingers will be released by FLP in June 2025. He is currently the organizer of the “Poetry Corner” feature which publishes poems on the second & fourth Tuesdays of the month on www.Ashland.News

Laurel Winter - Before moving to Southern Oregon, Laurel Winter grew up (to the extent that she did) in the mountains of Montana. She’s acquired an eclectic education, including credits in English, physics, and psychology from Montana State and numerous writing and art classes. She writes poetry, fiction of all lengths, and plays of the 10-minute variety. Her first novel, Growing Wings, was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award for children's fantasy and she's won back-to-back Rhysling and Asimov's Readers' Poll Awards for best poem, a World Fantasy Award for best Novella ("Sky Eyes"), and the 2003 McKnight Artist Fellowship for children's fiction. She likes to play games. She has twin sons, three grandchildren, and a passion for reading and playing games. You can learn more about Laurel HERE.

Jennifer Rood is a poet and artist living in Southern Oregon. She has been writing poems and stories since first grade, when her teacher would set aside time for her to read her work to the class. After bringing her love of learning and literature to thousands of students over 30 years of teaching in Grants Pass schools, she retired last summer in order to spend the fall of 2023 to write poetry as the Oregon Caves National Monument’s Artist in Residence. She is a past Board Member and President of the Oregon Poetry Association, and her poetry appears in dozens of journals and anthologies. In 2023 she released What the Heart Says, a chapbook collection of found poetry and art. Present and Speaking Everywhere (Not a Pipe Publishing, 2024) is her first full-length collection. Enjoy some of Jennifer’s found poetry on her Instagram @jennrood100.