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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Winter 2026
Reading Anna Akhmatova
Led by John Morrison
Six Sunday mornings: January 11 through February 15
10 am to 12 pm PST
via Zoom (recorded and available to participants for three weeks)
$75 Limited to 16 participants
For most of my life, I’ve regarded the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova as some kind of high priest of a different kind of poetry. One born and subject to the dark pressure of a relentless, cruel regime. Recently, I’ve been compelled to turn to her work and listen in a new and hungry way. We know reading is an act of resistance that builds resilience. To read Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet of the Soviet era, is to see the world, its beauty and terror, via her unflinching commitment and passion.
Akhmatova traveled in a broad artistic circle and was a leader in a crucial literary movement Acmeism that sought clarity versus the squishy symbolism at that time in vogue. Later, though silenced by Stalin and the Soviets, she resolved to remain in Russia despite the risk, to witness the suffering of her people during Stalinist totalitarianism. Fearing imprisonment, she wrote in secret. The lyric of her verse possesses a courage we need now. Our study group will rely on The Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by poet and scholar Judith Hemschemeyer and ask, what can we discover and take from Akhmatova’s poetry to strengthen us in the dark tumult of these days.
John Morrison’s first book, Heaven of the Moment, won the Rhea & Seymour Gorsline poetry competition and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. His most recent book Monkey Island was published by redbat books. He has received the C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship from Literary Arts. Numerous journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, and Rhino, have published his work. Currently, he teaches for the Attic Institute and is also an editor for The Comstock Review.
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Reading The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
Led by Tricia Snell
Six Saturday mornings: February 21 through March 28
10 am to 12 pm PST
via Zoom (recorded and available to participants for three weeks)
$75 Limited to 16 participants
Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s mesmerizing novel, The Wall, has become a feminist classic. It was originally published in 1963, translated into English and published by a small press in 1990, and reissued by New Directions in 2022. An excellent film adaptation was released in 2022, but don’t watch it before you read the book.
“Every woman I know who has read The Wall has been gripped by it,” said Naomi Huffman in The Atlantic.
The book’s unnamed heroine says, early in the novel, that she has not made much use of her freedom. “I had always been sedentary by nature,” she says, “and felt happiest at home.” This changes radically (or her definition of home certainly does). On a holiday with friends in the Austrian Alps, she becomes sealed off from the rest of humanity by an invisible, uncrossable wall. As the novel unfolds, she turns inward to her forest enclosure and her animal community, which includes a loving dog Lynx, a cat Pearl, and a cow Bella. As she writes her daily “report” we as readers become wrapped up in her new world and her physical, psychological, and spiritual transformation.
“It is not often that you can say ‘only a woman could have written this book’,” said Doris Lessing, “but women in particular will understand the heroine’s loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy.”
Feminist scholar Ann Richards, quoted in The New Yorker, said The Wall represents “a feminist ethics of care.” What exactly is a feminist ethics of care? In this study group, we’ll attempt to answer that question among many others, while simply enjoying the rich, broadly evocative, strange beauty of this slim but powerful novel.
Texts: The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer (translated by Shaun Whiteside), 248 pages, published by New Directions on June 21, 2022, available in bookstores and online.
Tricia Snell is a Canadian-American writer and teacher. She most recently published “So Late in the Season” in a short story anthology, Not the Same Road Out (2025, Tidewater Press) of tales set on the Trans Canada Trail. Other notable publications include two chapbooks (Nellie, 2024 and Rooted, 2023, The Little Books Collective) and in 2019, the short story, "Out to the Horses" published in Room Magazine (2019) and longlisted for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Short Story Prize. Tricia spent many years in the non-profit arts world (Executive Director of the Artist Communities Alliance, then of Caldera), she plays flute & Celtic whistles in an actively gigging trio called Trillium, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from George Mason University. After many years in Portland, Oregon, she now writes and teaches writing and literature from her home in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. www.triciasnell.com