We are very close to being able to take registrations for the Port Townsend Writers' Conference! In addition to the information posted at right, here are a number of the new, features that you'll find in 2008:
• An increased amoung of lectures, panels, readings and special workshops offered throughout the Conference. In addition to the regular morning workshops, optional afternoon workshops have been added. These afternoon workshops will last for an hour and a half, and be centered around specific topics: children’s literature; special poetic modes—the sonnet, for instance, or the haiku, or haibun writing—; writing the lyric essay; writing in conversation with a religious tradition; writing the novel; Latin-American magical realism; African magical realism; writing the novella; how to run a literary journal; book clubs for various authors; and so forth. There will be several of these workshops going on at any given time, and while our Conference faculty will teach many of them, we are also bringing in extra faculty just to teach these workshops.
• The Seminar building has become the campus Bookstore. In a cozy room replete with couches, overstuffed chairs, and coffee baristas, you'll find a place to meet one-on-one or in groups, talk, plan get-togethers, or just read and write. You also find shelves of books by our faculty, as well as the Goddard College faculty, and we'll also be selling our region's literary journals: The Bellingham Review, The Crab Creek Review, Tidepools, and Willow Springs, to name a few.
• In addition, we have brought in food services company Bon Appétit to provide locally grown, sustainable food throughout all of Centrum’s festivals, including the PTWC. Not to be confused with the magazine conglomerate of the same name, Bon Appétit is already getting rave reviews from Centrum participants who have experienced it.
• Our computer lab will now be open from 8 am until 5 pm, to make it easier to print out work prior to workshop times and after workshop times.
• While the amount of literary activities we are offering has increased exponentially (and Copper Canyon Press and Goddard College’s MFA program are also in residence at Fort Worden under the auspices of Centrum) we are also setting up the Conference so that there is a lot of time just to think and write, as well. Every activity outside of your core morning workshop is completely optional—and free.
• Sample Conference Day
7:30-8:30—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop with your core faculty member
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Optional special topic workshops, panels, readings, and lectures
4-5—Optional afternoon freewrite
6-7—Dinner
7:30—Faculty reading
The Port Townsend Writers' Conference is designed by writers and for writers, and is appropriate for beginning writers, writers completing their MFA, and published writers and teachers looking for the time and space to write. Please contact Port Townsend Writers' Conference program manager Jordan Hartt at 360.385.3102, x131 or jordan(at)centrum(dot)org.
Glasgow, Scotland, where she completed the bulk of "The Pink Institution," a novel that takes place in Mississippi. When she moved back to the United States, she wrote her follow-up novel, "The Meat and Spirit Plan," which takes place mostly in Scotland. 
In the way that William Faulkner set the bulk of his work in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Selah Saterstrom creates in her work the fictional Mississippi town of Beau Repose, where she has set much of her fiction. In lyric prose, Saterstrom revisits the mythic traditions of Southern writing with new angles. Spare, raw, and unflinching, her examination of modern-day Dixie renders the effects of violence--physical and emotional, suffered from others and self-inflicted--on individual lives.
