Start Your Own Damn Writing School

This last spring, I was discussing the Portland dilemma with a writing friend of mine. Being in a town without much of a corporate presence, with tons of creatives, is awesome, until the moment you need money. For mid-level writers such as myself, it’s a disaster. The physical distance from the publishing hubs makes it hard to sell your work. Our sheer numbers make it impossible to get teaching jobs. And all the freelance writing gigs are in other towns.

Then there’s what I call the “lack of groupies” phenomenon.

When you go to a city like San Francisco, there’s thousands of creativity-starved corporate office workers who go to bars, listen to music, and yes, attend literary readings. In Portland, we don’t have them. Everyone who’s here is already getting by in some weird creative way. We have just as many bars, just as much music, and just as many literary readings, but no one to attend them. Everybody’s performing; no one’s listening.

Considering the level of talent here, the lack of eyes and ears is immensely frustrating. We’ve got The Attic writing school here. We’ve got Dangerous Writers. We’ve got the Pinewood Table. PSU offers both a MFA in Creative Writing, and an MFA in Book Publishing. Tin House has their Summer Workshops. PNCA offers Creative Writing emphases. Then, there’s the community colleges. The list goes on.

There’s a glut, and not the population to sustain it. Hell, half the population already has their MFA’s.

That’s when the light bulb went off. Why not take all the writing talent we have here in Portland and find our groupies elsewhere? Why not take a cool social-networking platform, create an online classroom space, and teach what we know to people in places without the same resources?

So that was the genesis for the Basement Writing Workshop. We’re offering our first set of online creative writing classes in the Fall. We have students registered from Oklahoma, rural Washington, the Farm Belt, Ontario. We’re thrilled to give them a dose of Portland funk.