Last month, Literary Arts partnered with Grub Street in Boston and sent two of our 2014 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipients, Robert Arellano and Sarah Marshall, to Boston for Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace conference.
Robert Arellano has a post up at Grub Street Daily about his time at the conference. Here’s an excerpt:
The next day, at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace conference, I told people about many good things happening in Oregon letters. I talked about the writing community around Literary Ashland, the title of an excellent and open blog edited by my friend and coworker Edwin Battistella, whose new book from Oxford University Press is titled Sorry about That: the Language of Public Apology.
I told people about Nicholas deWolf, just this year launched the Oregon Story Board, a statewide initiative to create “a collaborative community of digital storytelling innovators.”
And I told people about Literary Arts, Oregon’s community-based nonprofit literary center, whose mission is simply (and ambitiously) to engage readers, support writers, and inspire the next generation with great literature. If you live and write in Oregon, you need to know that the deadline to apply for the 2015 Oregon Literary Fellowships is on June 27 this year. And wherever you hail from, we’d like to invite you to Portland in September for Literary Arts’ 30th birthday celebration, an evening with Elizabeth Gilbert & Calvin Trillin at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
At the Muse and the Marketplace, I asked everyone I met whether there was one thing they’d like to see Grub Street develop further. One instructor who has been teaching workshops for years dreamed of a mini-sabbatical program that would allow exceptional teachers one workshop’s worth of compensation to make progress on their own projects, reminding me a little of the Oregon Literary Fellowships. I met several students who said they would be interested in “master classes” that could be taught online by working writers from outside the Boston area. And an office manager from Harvard who has taken a multi-week extended Grub Street workshops suggested three-day intensives around themes like “jump-start your story” and “the map to finish your MS.”
Oregon needs Massachusetts. And Boston needs Portland. We’re sister states, in a way, mirror cities on the continent, and spiritually connected in areas we’re just beginning to explore: in rich literary and cultural traditions; as incubators for youth and innovator opportunities; by injecting the arts into technology education, thereby turning STEM into STEAM. And finally, permeating it all, in our love of good stories, and of the people who bring them to life.
You can read more at Grub Street Daily.
