Study Groups
Soapstone offers a program of six study groups each year on women writers. People of all genders and identities are welcome. Scholarships are available.
To register for a study group send an email to soapstonewriting@gmail.com, and once you receive a reply saying there is room in the group, we'll ask for payment through Zelle, or, if you prefer, a check made out to Soapstone, 622 SE 29th Avenue, Portland, OR 97214.
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Summer/Fall 2024
Reading Contemporary Poetry
Led by Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Four sessions, 3 hours each, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST
Saturday, August 3: Dorianne Laux on Belle Waring, Anne Marie Macari and Deborah Digges
Saturday, August 10: Joseph Millar on Ruth Stone and Sharon Olds
Saturday, August 17: Joseph Millar on Ruth Stone and Sharon Olds
Saturday, August 24: Dorianne Laux on Susanne Cleary, Mary Campbell, Phillils Levin
via Zoom
$75, scholarships available
Limited to 16 participants (waiting list only)
In alternating weeks, we will share and discuss a host of women poets such as the great Sharon Olds and Ruth Stone, as well as poets you may not yet be familiar with such as Belle Waring, Deborah Digges, and Suzanne Cleary, among others. All of these poets have something to say, and to teach us about life and the art of poetry. We will delve deeply into particular poems looking at themes, subjects, craft, and voice. Two or three books will be required (TBA). PDFs will be provided for poems not in the assigned books.
Dorianne Laux’s poetry collections include the Pulitzer Prize finalist Only As the Day Is Long. She received the Paterson Poetry Prize and is a founding faculty member of Pacific University's low-residency MFA program. She lives in Richmond, California. Her new poetry collection, Life on Earth is just out. “With this spellbinding seventh collection...Laux...brings to life the simple pleasures and small agonies of human existence...[she] makes the quotidian feel monumental in a way that is uniquely her own.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Joseph Millar is the author of Overtime, Fortune, Blue Rust, Kingdom, and Dark Harvest. His work has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches
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Reading Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, led by Ellen Waterston
Reading Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler led by Ellen Waterston
Six Saturday mornings 10am – noon PST
September 7 through 28, October 5 and 19
Via Zoom
$75, scholarship available
Limited to 16 participants
Patricia Smith’s BLOOD DAZZLER, a 2008 National Book Award finalist in poetry, chronicles Hurricane Katrina making landfall in New Orleans in 2005. The call to action this verse novel issues is as urgent and pertinent as ever, regardless of which social, political or environmental frontier the reader inhabits. That summons is written with innovation and skill. Indeed, I would say she has redefined the territory poetry can claim.
Join me in exploring how Smith blurs the distinctions between poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction in crafting the distinctive voice she is known for. You don’t have to be a dedicated poetry reader to easily engage with the characters and personified perspectives Smith illuminates in BLOOD DAZZLER. We’ll examine together her mastery of language, storytelling skills, and the wide variety of verse forms she enlists to power this extraordinary narrative. We’ll explore how Smith puts prose on notice with her innovative use of language. And we’ll enjoy ourselves—her writing bursts with energy, rhythm and color, her words leap from the page, burrow in our hearts, inspire our resolve. There’s no turning away.
In case you didn’t notice, I’m a fan. BLOOD DAZZLER and its author, Patricia Smith, have inspired me for years. I look forward to delving into these poems with you.
Patricia Smith is the award-winning author of eight critically-acclaimed books of poetry, including, most recently, Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023). Her books have won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the NAACP Image Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. That’s just for starters. Smith is a Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.
Award winning author and poet Ellen Waterston has published four poetry and three literary nonfiction titles, including, most recently, Walking the High Desert. She is founder of the Writing Ranch which, since 2000, has conducted workshops for established and emerging writers, and of the annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize, established in 2014 and adopted in 2019 as a program of the High Desert Museum. Based in Bend, she serves on the faculty of OSU-Cascades’ MFA in Creative Writing. In March and April of 2024 respectively, she was awarded Soapstone’s Bread and Roses Award and Oregon’s Literary Arts Holbrook Award for her work as an author and literary arts advocate.
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Reading Marie Howe, led by Andrea Hollander
Five Saturday mornings: 9:30 am to noon (PST)
November 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
via Zoom
$75, scholarships available
Limited to 16 participants
Description forthcoming.
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For a list of past study groups go to Previous Study Groups