DETAILS AND REGISTRATION FORM ARE NOW ONLINE. CLICK "FALL CONFERENCE" AT LEFT.
Reminder: OSPA Fall Conference is on October 15 and 16 in The Dalles.
The readings on Friday, October 15 and Saturday, October 16 will both be held in Clock Tower Ales. Friday’s night reading will feature Paisley Rekdal and Cindy Williams Gutiérrez, and Klindt’s will be on hand to sell copies of Paisley’s books. Paulann Petersen will read and speak on Saturday night, and will have copies of her books for sale at that time. There will be open mikes on both nights.
Clock Tower Ales is next door to The Dalles Inn, and serves both food and drink (not included in your conference fee). The building itself is another historic one; it was the second courthouse in The Dalles, and the second-to-last courthouse in Oregon that had a public hanging on its grounds. (The Dalles is one of those wonderful places where many of the buildings—because they are so old—used to be something else.)
The conference itself will take place in Building 1 at the Columbia Gorge Community College. (Building 1 is a newer building, so not any history there. Two of the other 3 campus buildings are old, however; one was a mental hospital at one point.)
The college is located at the top of a hill, and has incredible mountain, river, dam, town, and gorge views. Lunch is included in the conference fee, and will be held at the college. Workshop descriptions are below.
What Do You Mean My Line Breaks Could Be Better? A Workshop on Rethinking Rhythm with Paisley Rekdal
Free verse poems put a lot of demands on both the writer and reader’s understandings of lineation: how line breaks work, how end-stopping vs. enjambment might change or enhance rhythm and meaning, how spacing and punctuation might even provide hints into the writer’s (unspoken) desires and anxieties about the poem itself. By looking at a variety of poetic lines and contemporary poems—from the absences that riddle Sapphic-like fragments to the punctuation in complete prose poems—this workshop will focus our attention on the many ways lineation helps to create and enhance poetic meaning and rhythm.
Arrivals: A Look at the Endings of William Stafford Poems with Cindy Williams Gutiérrez
William Stafford wrote of “the emergency of being alive.” When a poem pulses with this emergency, it grabs the reader’s attention and never lets us go. And by the time the poem ends, it leaves the reader breathless. William Stafford did this time and time again—through stark juxtaposition, through subtle understatement, through inarguable truth. Stafford arrived at his poem’s endings through discovery. He was a seeker, a traveler through the dark who moved persistently toward the essential. We will explore the endings of several of his poems and experiment with how our own poems can arrive at their essence.
More information will be in the next newsletter and on the OSPA web site soon! If you have any questions, please email me at
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I am very excited about this conference. Cindy does a lot of spoken-word poetry and theater, and contributes in these capacities to a variety of Latino heritage events in Portland. One of Paisley’s students just won the Field Book Award, and her own poetry—much of it long and lyrical—is humorous and heartfelt. Her memoir, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, is one of my favorite nonfiction books. Paulann will have a new book out by the time we gather in October, and I know we are all looking forward to more of her fine poetry. Three of my favorite poets in one place? That’s what I call Oo Syel (that’s “heaven” in Michif, for those of you not up on your dead languages of North America). Plus, we’ll have workshops on line breaks and endings, and who hasn’t struggled with one or both of these issues in our poems? Anyone else out there sometimes hit readers over the head with a poem’s last few lines? Anyone else ever been told in a critique group that their line breaks are odd, confusing, or just bad? Come on—I know you are out there! No matter how long we’ve been writing poems, we can always learn something to make our writing stronger. Cindy and Paisley both have great senses of humor, so I can promise you that these workshops will be both educational and fun! I look forward to seeing you in beautiful and historic The Dalles in October!
—Christine Delea, OSPA President
