WCM 502 Poetry

Content: Sometimes an idea, a story, a dream, a question or a bolt of memory longs to become a poem or song. In this workshop, we will celebrate the winsome habit of poetry to turn small discoveries into a set of rhythmic lines that say much in few words. We'll read lively texts, start many lyric experiments, and talk along the way about how to share this quirky and welcoming way of writing with our students.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 504 Bearing Witness: Writing, Documentary Studies, Social Justice

Content: What is the writer's, teacher's, citizen's, or counselor's role in bearing witness? How do we observe, record, and interpret events from the everyday to the unspeakable? In this nonfiction workshop, we'll explore a continuum of creative nonfiction including literary journalism, essay, and memoir. We'll write from our own observations of cultural life, exploring ethical issues as well as style, voice, and literary form.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 506 Stafford Studies

Content: This course consists of reading, writing, discussion, and special projects growing from the poetry and prose of William Stafford. Using the resources of published books and the William Stafford Archives, participants practice inquiry into Stafford's approach to writing, thinking, teaching, and witness for reconciliation, and from this inquiry develop their own approaches to writing, teaching, and witness.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

WCM 507 Essay

Content: What are essays, and why do we want to teach them? The essay form invites writers to express ideas of universal value in a personal voice. Participants will be introduced to writing and learning activities moving from exploratory writing to composing essays. Along the way, we will explore drafting, response to work in progress, keeping a reading and listening journal, and gathering our powers toward a sense of deep play in the writing of essays.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 508 Explorations in Graduate Writing

Content: For students in all programs, this course teaches forms and styles required in graduate study, and explores the context in which prospective teachers, counselors, and administrators learn by writing. It describes the writing process, reviews principles of clear writing, and acquaints students with the particular expectations for graduate level writing. We invite you to experience various forms inquiry may take as you compose individual response to the authority of knowledge in published texts.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 509 Revision

Content: Henry James described revision as a "re-dreaming." This workshop invites participants to suspend the notion of revision as editing, and practice revision as finding the story under the story, the poem within a poem, the hot heart of the essay. Revise a work-in-progress, or use writing generated from prompts in class, as we kindle what gives our writing breath and life.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 510 Memoir

Content: Writing chapters from one's life story can produce gifts for family, and an important record of community life. In this workshop, we will read short passages from a variety of voices reflecting on lessons learned from life encounters and from interviews we conduct. We will use these passages as prompts for our own writing, leading to a gathering of short life chapters for further reflection and revision over time. No experience necessary, but a willing heart.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 512 The Gift

Content: How do we maintain self and community in a society driven by market exchange? What are our cultural norms for gifts and reciprocity? How do gifts bind families and communities? How do we discover the "gift of labor," work that satisfies beyond financial compensation? What is the artist's role in a consumer culture? These are among the questions posed by poet Lewis Hyde in his classic study of literary anthropology, The Gift. These are also the questions that motivate our exploration of gifts in this course. We take Hyde's questions as springboards from which to launch our own investigation of culture, community, gift, story, and work.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 513 Field Notes: Observation and Reflection in the Natural World

Content: In a time of increasing attention to human responsibility for the Earth, we begin with the question for teachers and counselors: What are best connections to the natural world--for success as learners, and health as human beings? Writers, scientists, artists, educators, and counselors provide a rich array of responses. Participants will observe nature, begin to practice field notes, and consider opportunities in teaching and counseling practice to attend to right relation with the Earth.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 515 The Practice of Writing

Content: Trying our hands at a variety of experimental forms, we will bring our attention to events best told as stories, questions best explored as brief essays, discoveries and mysteries best told as poems, and other explorations of connection between what we have experienced and what we might say. This course is for writers interested in pushing their practice in multiple directions, and for teachers who want to engage the widest variety of student writers.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 516 Telling Lives

Content: Which stories are ours to tell and which carry us into the terrain of others' lives? Our own stories often intersect with those entrusted to us by family, friends, and strangers; all are shaped by the cultures we inhabit. In this workshop, we'll explore biography, ethnography, journalistic portraits, and documentary writing. Our texts will include our own writing as well as works by various writers and practitioners in documentary inquiry.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 518 Storymaking I/II

Content: How do writers turn the stuff of life into rich and compelling stories? Whether we craft fiction or personal essays, we need the elements of storymaking: plot, character, point of view, dialogue, and narrative time. In addition to writing our stories, we will study short works by Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Babel, John Berger, Anton Chekhov, Colette, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Mansfield and Edna O'Brien, in order to learn how they achieved their effects.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

WCM 522 Imaginative Writing Seminar: Works in Progress

Content: Open to graduate students and to writers, filmmakers, digital storytellers, and creators in other media, this seminar is a collaborative studio for completing creative work. The seminar directs the energies of the seminar community in the development of individual works in progress, with reference to the best in contemporary writing and documentary expressions in other media.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 527 Fiction

Content: This workshop is for writers who want to explore or refine the craft of fiction writing in a nurturing and challenging environment. We will read short fiction and discuss different aspects of storytelling including conflict, plot, character development, atmosphere, point of view and dialogue. Works-in-progress will be developed through individual conferences with the instructor and in class-discussion.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 530 Daily Writing in the Spirit of William Stafford

Content: You don't eat just once every few days. You don't speak just every week or so. Learning is continuous, and hunger is closer to breathing than to an annual rite. So why not write daily? In this workshop, we will feed on examples from the daily writing of William Stafford, and practice in the spirit of his work. The emphasis will be on the process of creation: creating texts the length of poems but for use in multiple genres. The goal will be to know what it feels like--in the body and in acts of sustaining witness--to practice the continuous writing life you have imagined.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 532 Writing Culture

Content: What shapes our identities as members of a family, workplace, religious group, or nation? How do we learn the rules for how to act in unfamiliar cultures, and how do we write about that experience? In this workshop, we'll write to discover the unique patterns of our own cultural worlds as well as those we've entered through literature, travel, and everyday experience. We'll read contemporary nonfiction to explore different cultural perspectives and we'll examine issues of craft, including character development, voice, and literary form. The workshop may also involve fieldwork and documentation of Portland life.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 533 Speaking: Voice, Place, Kinship

Content: Why are speeches often boring, formal, flat? Where are the resonant stories that could drive an audience wild, and make them go forth changed? We will develop a personal "story bag" of experiences, sayings, family and professional lore, and other resources, and then sequence these riches for a speech of any length, an audience of any size or disposition. The only stage fright will be felt by your listeners: what will this character say next?
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 535 Cultural Journalism

Content: Based on community-based education as developed at the Foxfire Project in Georgia, this workshop will emphasize a project approach to teaching and learning. Educators will explore ways to fulfill and go beyond their mandated curriculum, and give students a voice in planning what happens in the classroom. In experiential education students make connections between work at school and the real world and produce a product valued by an audience outside the classroom.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 545 Exploring Life Stories: The Art of the Interview

Content: Writers, oral historians, ethnographers, teachers, counselors, and families recording their stories all rely on interviews. In this workshop, we'll learn the interviewer's skills: how to listen and observe, frame questions, index and transcribe. We'll write together to bring the interviews to life on the page. We'll examine individual and social memory as well as ethical and political issues. We'll also explore the use of interviews in community projects and as the foundation of documentary studies.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 546 Reading Other Voices

Content: This course will bring together graduate students and educators and counselors from the community to find ways to incorporate culturally sensitive texts in their work. We will draw from a variety of texts that address differences in race and culture such as Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising, Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians. We will write from our own cultural backgrounds to uncover how our worldview shapes the reading of works made unfamiliar by different notions of self and community, time, religious and social values. Reading and writing together, we will experience the richness and multiple dimensions of language itself.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 548 Healing Power of Story

Content: The hardest times in life can make you "voiceless," but also offer the greatest opportunity for stories. At these times the invitation to tell someone your story can be a critical encouragement in the healing process. As caregivers, teachers, counselors, parents, nurses, doctors, and patients, we will look at our own stories and those of others to practice strength and healing. Through writing, we will explore the uses of journals, fiction, essays, and poetry in the telling and receiving of stories.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 574 Personal Voice in Professional Writing

Content: A workshop to explore the power of writing to engage diverse perspectives, ideas, and cultures at the restless boundary between personal insight and professional practice. In our search for equity, social justice, and inclusion, collaborative writing in professional life may be the most important writing we do. As educators our own writing is our best teacher, as counselors our written reflections will give us our best advice, and as leaders our work will be improved by writing about the challenges we face. To foster expressive clarity, the class as a writing community examines reading, collaboration, personal voice, critical thinking, and audience.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 576 Special Studies: Northwest Writing Institute

Content: This course uses writing as a tool for inquiry and creative expression. Taught with varying emphases based on the cultural moment, the course offers Graduate Students and community members practice with writing, and reflection on the chapters in a life, and investigates how the practice of writing can deepen vocation. Students write in a learning community, and share works in progress. Offered in varied formats-meeting weekends, monthly over two terms, or in a traditional structure-to meet the needs of adult learners.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 602 Poetry

Content: Sometimes an idea, a story, a dream, a question or a bolt of memory longs to become a poem or song. In this workshop, we will celebrate the winsome habit of poetry to turn small discoveries into a set of rhythmic lines that say much in few words. We'll read lively texts, start many lyric experiments, and talk along the way about how to share this quirky and welcoming way of writing with our students.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 604 Bearing Witness: Writing, Documentary Studies, Social Justice

Content: What is the writer's, teacher's, citizen's, or counselor's role in bearing witness? How do we observe, record, and interpret events from the everyday to the unspeakable? In this nonfiction workshop, we'll explore a continuum of creative nonfiction including literary journalism, essay, and memoir. We'll write from our own observations of cultural life, exploring ethical issues as well as style, voice, and literary form.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 606 Stafford Studies

Content: This course consists of reading, writing, discussion, and special projects growing from the poetry and prose of William Stafford. Using the resources of published books and the William Stafford Archives, participants practice inquiry into Stafford's approach to writing, thinking, teaching, and witness for reconciliation, and from this inquiry develop their own approaches to writing, teaching, and witness.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

WCM 607 Essay

Content: What are essays, and why do we want to teach them? The essay form invites writers to express ideas of universal value in a personal voice. Participants will be introduced to writing and learning activities moving from exploratory writing to composing essays. Along the way, we will explore drafting, response to work in progress, keeping a reading and listening journal, and gathering our powers toward a sense of deep play in the writing of essays.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 608 Explorations in Graduate Writing

Content: For students in all programs, this course teaches forms and styles required in graduate study, and explores the context in which prospective teachers, counselors, and administrators learn by writing. It describes the writing process, reviews principles of clear writing, and acquaints students with the particular expectations for graduate level writing. We invite you to experience various forms inquiry may take as you compose individual response to the authority of knowledge in published texts.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 609 Revision

Content: Henry James described revision as a "re-dreaming." This workshop invites participants to suspend the notion of revision as editing, and practice revision as finding the story under the story, the poem within a poem, the hot heart of the essay. Revise a work-in-progress, or use writing generated from prompts in class, as we kindle what gives our writing breath and life.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 610 Memoir

Content: Writing chapters from one's life story can produce gifts for family, and an important record of community life. In this workshop, we will read short passages from a variety of voices reflecting on lessons learned from life encounters and from interviews we conduct. We will use these passages as prompts for our own writing, leading to a gathering of short life chapters for further reflection and revision over time. No experience necessary, but a willing heart.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 612 The Gift

Content: How do we maintain self and community in a society driven by market exchange? What are our cultural norms for gifts and reciprocity? How do gifts bind families and communities? How do we discover the "gift of labor," work that satisfies beyond financial compensation? What is the artist's role in a consumer culture? These are among the questions posed by poet Lewis Hyde in his classic study of literary anthropology, The Gift. These are also the questions that motivate our exploration of gifts in this course. We take Hyde's questions as springboards from which to launch our own investigation of culture, community, gift, story, and work.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 613 Field Notes: Observation and Reflection in the Natural World

Content: In a time of increasing attention to human responsibility for the Earth, we begin with the question for teachers and counselors: What are best connections to the natural world--for success as learners, and health as human beings? Writers, scientists, artists, educators, and counselors provide a rich array of responses. Participants will observe nature, begin to practice field notes, and consider opportunities in teaching and counseling practice to attend to right relation with the Earth.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 615 The Practice of Writing

Content: Trying our hands at a variety of experimental forms, we will bring our attention to events best told as stories, questions best explored as brief essays, discoveries and mysteries best told as poems, and other explorations of connection between what we have experienced and what we might say. This course is for writers interested in pushing their practice in multiple directions, and for teachers who want to engage the widest variety of student writers.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 616 Telling Lives

Content: Which stories are ours to tell and which carry us into the terrain of others' lives? Our own stories often intersect with those entrusted to us by family, friends, and strangers; all are shaped by the cultures we inhabit. In this workshop, we'll explore biography, ethnography, journalistic portraits, and documentary writing. Our texts will include our own writing as well as works by various writers and practitioners in documentary inquiry.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 618 Storymaking I/II

Content: How do writers turn the stuff of life into rich and compelling stories? Whether we craft fiction or personal essays, we need the elements of storymaking: plot, character, point of view, dialogue, and narrative time. In addition to writing our stories, we will study short works by Hans Christian Andersen, Isaac Babel, John Berger, Anton Chekhov, Colette, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Mansfield and Edna O'Brien, in order to learn how they achieved their effects.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 2 semester hours.

WCM 622 Imaginative Writing Seminar: Works in Progress

Content: Open to graduate students and to writers, filmmakers, digital storytellers, and creators in other media, this seminar is a collaborative studio for completing creative work. The seminar directs the energies of the seminar community in the development of individual works in progress, with reference to the best in contemporary writing and documentary expressions in other media.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 627 Fiction

Content: This workshop is for writers who want to explore or refine the craft of fiction writing in a nurturing and challenging environment. We will read short fiction and discuss-different aspects of storytelling including conflict, plot, character development, atmosphere, point of view, and dialogue. Works-in-progress-will be developed through individual conferences with the instructor and in class-discussion.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 630 Daily Writing in the Spirit of William Stafford

Content: You don't eat just once every few days. You don't speak just every week or so. Learning is continuous, and hunger is closer to breathing than to an annual rite. So why not write daily? In this workshop, we will feed on examples from the daily writing of William Stafford, and practice in the spirit of his work. The emphasis will be on the process of creation: creating texts the length of poems but for use in multiple genres. The goal will be to know what it feels like--in the body and in acts of sustaining witness--to practice the continuous writing life you have imagined.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 632 Writing Culture

Content: What shapes our identities as members of a family, workplace, religious group, or nation? How do we learn the rules for how to act in unfamiliar cultures, and how do we write about that experience? In this workshop, we'll write to discover the unique patterns of our own cultural worlds as well those we've entered through literature, travel and everyday experience. We'll read contemporary nonfiction to explore different cultural perspectives as well as issues of craft, including character, voice, and literary form. The workshop may also involve fieldwork and documentation of Portland life.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 633 Speaking: Voice, Place, Kinship

Content: Why are speeches often boring, formal, flat? Where are the resonant stories that could drive an audience wild, and make them go forth changed? We will develop a personal "story bag" of experiences, sayings, family and professional lore, and other resources, and then sequence these riches for a speech of any length, an audience of any size or disposition. The only stage fright will be felt by your listeners: what will this character say next?
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 635 Cultural Journalism

Content: Based on community-based education as developed at the Foxfire Project in Georgia, this workshop will emphasize a project approach to teaching and learning. Educators will explore ways to fulfill and go beyond their mandated curriculum, and give students a voice in planning what happens in the classroom. In experiential education students make connections between work at school and the real world and produce a product valued by an audience outside the classroom.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 645 Exploring Life Stories: The Art of the Interview

Content: Writers, oral historians, ethnographers, teachers, counselors, and families recording their stories all rely on interviews. In this workshop, we'll learn the interviewer's skills: how to listen and observe, frame questions, index and transcribe. We'll write together to bring the interviews to life on the page. We'll examine individual and social memory as well as ethical and political issues. We'll also explore the use of interviews in community projects and as the foundation of documentary studies.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.

WCM 646 Reading Other Voices

Content: This course will bring together graduate students and educators and counselors from the community to find ways to incorporate culturally sensitive texts in their work. We will draw from a variety of texts that address differences in race and culture such as Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising, Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians. We will write from our own cultural backgrounds to uncover how our worldview shapes the reading of works made unfamiliar by different notions of self and community, time, religious and social values. Reading and writing together, we will experience the richness and multiple dimensions of language itself.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 648 Healing Power of Story

Content: The hardest times in life can make you "voiceless," but also offer the greatest opportunity for stories. At these times the invitation to tell someone your story can be a critical encouragement in the healing process. As caregivers, teachers, counselors, parents, nurses, doctors, and patients, we will look at our own stories and those of others to practice strength and healing. Through writing, we will explore the uses of journals, fiction, essays, and poetry in the telling and receiving of stories.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 674 Personal Voice in Professional Writing

Content: A workshop to explore the power of writing to engage diverse perspectives, ideas, and cultures at the restless boundary between personal insight and professional practice. In our search for equity, social justice, and inclusion, collaborative writing in professional life may be the most important writing we do. As educators our own writing is our best teacher, as counselors our written reflections will give us our best advice, and as leaders our work will be improved by writing about the challenges we face. To foster expressive clarity, the class as a writing community examines reading, collaboration, personal voice, critical thinking, and audience.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1 semester hour.

WCM 676 Special Studies: Northwest Writing Institute

Content: This course uses writing as a tool for inquiry and creative expression. Taught with varying emphases based on the cultural moment, the course offers Graduate Students and community members practice with writing, and reflection on the chapters in a life, and investigates how the practice of writing can deepen vocation. Students write in a learning community, and share works in progress. Offered in varied formats-meeting weekends, monthly over two terms, or in a traditional structure-to meet the needs of adult learners.
Prerequisites: None.
Credits: 1-2 semester hours.