Port Townsend Writers Conference

03/18/2025

The application period for Centrum’s Long Form Novel Workshop with Jonathan Evison is still open, but not for long. It closes March 31!

This workshop is a unique opportunity to join Jonathan, national bestselling author of 9 novels, and a tight community of your peers. You will also hear from some of the best storytellers writing today while you work toward completing a draft of your own novel.

The workshop includes two weeks in person at Fort Worden State Park at the Port Townsend Writers Conference (July 2025 and July 2026) and 2 online sessions a month led by Jonathan and award-winning guest speakers for a year!

This workshop is designed to provide you with community, accountability and expertise. Jonathan will guide you as you distill your narrative and thematic vision for your work, develop wholly realized characters with fully developed dramatic arcs, ever aware of conflict, stakes, rhetorical persuasion, thematic cohesion, and all the elements of drama that make a novel sing.

In addition to working with Jonathan himself, you will work with with award-winning novelists including Kristin Hannah (The Nightingale), Stewart O'Nan (Last Night at the Lobster), Jami Attenberg (The Middlesteins), W***y Vlautin (Lean on Pete), along Lidia Yuknavitch (The Chronology of Water) along with a professional editor and an prominent agent (TBA).

For more information and to submit your application, visit https://centrum.org/program/writers-long-form-workshop/

About Long Form Novel Writing Workshop July 2025 – July 2026 This 12-month, comprehensive and intensive novel writing workshop, led by New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Evison, provides an in-depth experience in developing your novel from draft to near completion. Beginning in July 2025 w...

03/14/2025

2025 Port Townsend Writers Conference Faculty Feature: Anna Quinn!

Anna Quinn is the author of The Night Child, (Blackstone, 2018) listed as #1 Best Real Psychological Fiction on Goodreads, and Ingram’s 2018 Best Book Group Book. Her second novel, Angeline, (Blackstone 2023) is a Foreword Review Winner and was nominated for a Washington State Book Award. Her work has garnered praise from Meg Waite Clayton, Elizabeth George, Luis Alberto Urrea, Pam Houston, Melissa Febos, Lidia Yuknavitch, Library Journal, and more. Quinn’s writing has appeared in Psychology Today, New York Times Book Review, Medium, Writer’s Digest, and the Alone Together Anthology. She is the founder of The Writers’ Workshoppe in Port Townsend, WA., and has thirty years of experience teaching and leading writing workshops across the country.

This summer at the Port Townsend Writers Conference Anna will lead a weeklong fiction workshop - From Skin to Soul: Deepening Character Interiority.

In this workshop, you will write from within your characters and immerse yourself inside the truest part of their consciousness. Through a blend of discussion, literary analysis, writing exercises and constructive feedback, you'll experiment with techniques that will take you beyond the expected and behind the hidden. You’ll work to develop complex characters who reflect the intricacies of their specific human experience—and why sometimes, what they say and do is so different from what they think and feel. Finally, you’ll look at how your particular voice and stylistic choices can express that interiority on the page and create an engaging narrative that fosters a genuine emotional connection for both the writer and the reader.

Registration for Anna's workshop is open now! Visit https://centrum.org/program/writers-conference/ for more details and registration.

03/10/2025

Let's celebrate Port Townsend Writers Conference alumna new book, The Dry Season, and check out the upcoming pre-publication event!

On May 22, at 7pm ET, Melissa will hold a free craft session and reading from The Dry Season and give a short talk, “Memoir for Hard Times,” followed by a brief reading and Q&A session. All you have to do is submit proof of your pre-order of the book! Link to register: https://sites.prh.com/thedryseasonpreorder

Melissa has taught afternoon sessions and morning intensives at PTWC, and people always leave her lectures and workshops inspired!

Preorder THE DRY SEASON to attend an exclusive pre-publication event with Melissa Febos.

03/06/2025

2025 Port Townsend Writers Conference Faculty Feature: Tessa Hulls!

Tessa is an artist, writer, and adventurer who is equally likely to disappear into the backcountry or a research library. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, Adventure Journal, and others, and she received the 2021 Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award.

Her debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, traces three generations of women in her family against a backdrop of Chinese history and diaspora to explore the complex ways that mothers and daughters both damage and save one another. Feeding Ghosts was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction, and is currently a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

This summer at the Port Townsend Writers Conference Tessa will lead a weeklong workshop: Exploring the Borders of Graphic Narrative. Writers and artists will use analog materials of pen, pencil, and color on paper, (though they are welcome to augment this by bringing iPads if you work digitally) to learn how to weave unexpected inspirations into graphic narratives to create works rich with surprise and deep emotional resonance. You’ll study comics artists such as Thi Bui, David B, Lee Lai, Nora Krug, Alison Bechdel, Christophe Chabouté, and Eleanor Davis— but you’ll also draw from poetry, visual art, cartography, somatics, and the works of genre-spanning creatives like Shing Yin Kor, Sophie Calle, and Twyla Tharp.

Registration for Tessa's workshop is open now! Visit https://centrum.org/program/writers-conference/ for more details and registration

02/27/2025

2025 Port Townsend Writers Conference Faculty Feature: Toni Jensen!

A member of this year’s morning faculty, Toni will teach an intensive writing workshop each morning during the Conference. Morning workshops are deep dives into content, approach, and the craft of writing with a tight group of writers who work together all week and form strong bonds.

Toni’s workshop is “Writing Toward Balance in Narrative Nonfiction.” What does it mean to blend our own stories with those of others? What does it mean to incorporate research or contemporary events into the stories of our lives? How do we work to balance our stories with others’ stories or with research? In this nonfiction workshop, we’ll wrestle with these questions of balance, find some answers, do some generative writing, and read and discuss each other’s work. Narrative nonfiction tells a true story or stories, using fictional techniques, and encompasses memoir, personal essays, narrative journalism and many other forms.

To register for Toni's workshop, visit https://centrum.org/program/writers-conference/

Toni is the author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, a Dayton Peace Prize finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. Jensen’s essays have appeared in journals and magazines such as Orion, Catapult and Ecotone. She also is the author of the story collection From the Hilltop. Jensen has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Métis.

02/14/2025

Since opening registration two weeks ago, workshops for the 2025 Port Townsend Writers Conference have filled quickly, some in just hours! Others only have a few spots left.

We don’t want you to miss your chance to hone your writing, build your writing community, and get inspired on shores of the Salish Sea at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington!

If writing is one of your beloved Valentines this year, visit https://centrum.org/program/writers-conference/ for more info and to register.

Morning intensive and craft lecture faculty include Bryce Andrews, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Debra Magpie Earling, Tess Gallagher, Terrance Hayes, Tessa Hulls, Toni Jensen, Claudia Castro Luna, Valerie Miner, and Anna Quinn.

Afternoon drop-in workshop faculty include Alice Anderson, Dawn Pichon Barron, Erica Bauermeister, Ryler Dustin, Bryan Fry, Kathryn Hunt, Gary Copeland Lilley, Nicole Persun, Nicole J. Persun, Peter Quinn, and Robert Stubblefield.

AND we only have 5 First Impressions Writing Sample Consultations left with editing faculty, Elizabeth Thorpe!

12/30/2024

In 2025, the Port Townsend Writers Conference returns to a seven-day schedule, from Sunday, July 13 to Sunday, July 20.

Our Artistic Director, Gary Copeland Lilley, has worked hard to recruit faculty this coming year. Join us at Fort Worden State Park for more time to write, revise, connect, and reflect on the shores of the Salish Sea with a community of writers we have formed together for over 50 years. (We’ll even draw - this year our new faculty member, Tessa Hulls, author and illustrator of Feeding Ghosts, will offer a morning workshop in the graphic memoir!)

Registration details coming soon! For current info, including workshop descriptions and faculty details, visit https://centrum.org/program/writers-conference/

Morning workshop and craft lecture faculty: Bryce Andrews, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Debra Magpie Earling, Tess Gallagher, Terrance Hayes, Tessa Hulls, Toni Jensen, Claudia Castro Luna, Valerie Miner, and Anna Quinn

Afternoon workshop faculty: Alice Anderson, Dawn Pichón Barron, Erica Bauermeister, Bryan Fry, Nicole Persun, Peter Quinn, Robert Stubblefield, and more TBA

First Impressions Writing Sample Consultations with editing faculty Elizabeth Thorpe

08/14/2024

Centrum is on PBS news hour! Don’t this feature on one of the greatest arts programs and locations in the west, if not the country!

07/22/2024

Another Port Townsend Writers’ Conference in the books. A milestone. Our 50th.

What a birthday party it was! Thanks to our faculty, Susan Landgraf and Sam Ligon!

And thanks to all you writers. This workshops is yours, and we’re glad you came, shared community, shared your works, and left inspired!

We celebrated with walks on the Salish Sea, strolls across the grounds of through madrones and moss-draped cedars, open mics, pie and whisky, and of course, some the most insightful and inspiring morning and afternoon workshops, readings, and lectures around!

We also celebrated by giving back, didn’t we? Our community raised nearly $10,000 for scholarships to make sure writers from all walks have an opportunity to attend our Conference next year!

PTWC’s founder even showed up to read for us on Friday night! Thanks, Bill, for starting this conference 5 decades ago. Hope we’re making yuh proud!

Here’s to the next 50 years, 50 more years of writing and writers at Fort Worden!

07/22/2024

These readers will be incredible. Don’t miss Poetry on the Salish Sea! Deets below.

We're just one week away from the second of four events at , bringing poetry and community together for our Summer Sunday Readings series!

Join POSS on Sunday, July 28, as we welcome poets Rae Armantrout, Kay Ryan and Heather McHugh ❤

Learn more at: https://poetrysalishsea.com/

07/12/2024

***Heads up. Schedule change. This year's Port Townsend Writers Conference faculty, Stephanie Land, is reading on Thursday, July 18 (not Friday). Details below:

📣 Centrum has an important update about the Port Townsend Writers Conference and our Free Public Reading Series.

Author and former Port Townsend resident, Stephanie Land, will read at the Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden State Park on *** Thursday, July 18, 2024 ***. The reading starts at 7 p.m.

(She was originally scheduled for the following evening, Friday, July 19.)

Originally from Port Townsend, Stephanie is the New York Times bestselling author of MAID: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, which became the inspiration for the hit Netflix series Maid. She is also the author of CLASS: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. Her writing focuses on social and economic justice and parenting under the poverty line. She is a frequent speaker at colleges and national advocacy organizations.

The PTWC Free Public Reading Series allows Port Townsend residents to attend readings from some of the most award-winning and influential voices of our time, who come to Fort Worden from all over the country to teach writing workshops, craft lectures, and read their work during the week of Centrum’s Port Townsend Writers Conference.

Check out our event calendar on centrum.org to view all of the wonderful authors joining us for this year's Writers Conference - which is also celebrating it's 50th year!