Outside Experience

The Rainier Writing Workshop features a distinguishing "outside experience"

Intended to foster an independent writing career and to introduce participants to broader aspects of the writing life, each participant will design an experience to fit his or her individual needs and interests. Some examples are:

    • residencies (such as Arts Centers) where participants may work on a sustained project;
    • experiences where participants may encounter voices and approaches other than those of our faculty;
    • study abroad;
    • travel, here or abroad;
    • innovative internships;
    • community service;
    • publishing projects;
    • teaching, or developing curricula;
    • other projects directed toward future literary activities.

The Program Director will guide the design of these programs and will act as the official advisor for this aspect of the program.

The program will help arrange for an independent residency at writers' centers and retreats and/or study abroad in a variety of programs in literature, writing, or language. We have a special arrangement with two such centers and we will be happy to contact others or suggest programs of study abroad. In addition, we will provide letters of recommendation for intenships, summer workshops, etc.

Scholarships:

The Vermont Studio Center has offered Rainier Writing Workshops two partial scholarships for a month-long residency in Johnson, VT. They have a number of visiting writers available for conferences, so the month would be determined by the genre in which you are working. Some travel money may also be available.

For more information: Vermont Studio Center

The Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota will guarantee one of its few spots for writers to someone from the Rainier Writing Workshops; this opportunity is partially supported bt the program's Deborah Tall scholarship. Certain months will not be available.

For more information: Anderson Center

Other possibilities:

Other centers include the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Centrum. Centers in other countries include the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland and Hawthornden in Scotland.

Summer workshops where participants can hear new and different writers might make up a part of an outside experience. This might include a workshop abroad, such as the Prague Summer Workshop. A complete listing of such workshops can be found in Poets & Writers magazine or the AWP Writer's Chronicle.

Some examples, 2005-2007

§Residencies:

Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; The Anderson Center, Red Wing, MN; Soapstone, Nehalem, OR; Centrum, Port Townsend, WA; Montana Artists’ Refuge, Basin, MT.

§Interships:

Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA.

§Teaching:

University of Nebraska at Omaha; Wenatchee Valley College; The Hugo House, Seattle, WA; University of Washington Experimental College

§Travel:

• Rented a house in Carmel, California for three weeks to study the work of poet Robinson Jeffers.

• Travel to London to research the setting of a novel.

§Comminity Service:

• Designed a public art project, acting as both editor, soliciting and choosing poems on the subject of peace, and publisher, working with a small, local press to create 13 different broadsides to be displayed during National Poetry Month.

• Developed a reading series for the Puyallup community: “A River & Sound Review” whose mission it is to “enrich the readers of the Puyallup community with a diversity of established, emerging and student voices.”

• Combined an interest in community service with memoir writing by working with her physician to set up the Legacy Project, a writing project to capture patients’ life stories through the writing of Life Reviews, then shared guidelines with hospice workers.

• Worked with middle school students in Rochester, NY, in a joint project with artists and mathematicians planning a mural for the school cafeteria;
students then painted and wrote about the process—leaving something of lasting quality for the inner-city school.

§Miscellaneous:

• One of 12 writers chosen for the Jack Straw Writers’ Program, in which writers receive performance training, are interviewed by the program curator, and present a half-hour live performance of their work for broadcast on National Public Radio’s KUOW.

• Compiled an anthology of pieces about Alzheimer’s, calling for submissions in national venues, selecting pieces from among hundreds of submissions, arranging for an introduction by Tess Gallagher, to be published by Kent State University Press.

• Interviewed members of The News Tribune staff in Tacoma to determine how fiction and reporting inform each other.

• Screened hundreds of manuscript entries for the 2006 Pleides Press Competition.

• Collaborated with a photographer to develop a joint show of writing and photography.

• Developed a writers’ retreat and study week at a Bed & Breakfast in the San Juan Islands.