Compose Creative Writing Conference 2026

This year’s Compose conference will feature keynote speakers David Biespiel and Matthew Dickman, a publishing panel by Elisa Saphier, Ali Shaw, and Laura Stanfill, and workshops on a variety of writing topics such as the publishing process, poetry, and writing tools.

Admission: $25 General / $10 for Students

Keynote: Join David Biespiel and Matthew Dickman for a keynote address to open the conference at 10:00 a.m. Doors will open at 9:30 a.m.

Location: Compose will be held in Roger Rook Hall on the CCC Oregon City Campus, with workshops to follow.

Workshops: After the keynote address and panel, participants can choose between five early afternoon sessions and five late afternoon sessions.

Info: As you polish up your story, your eyes will inevitably turn toward the next steps. For many, this often includes bringing in a literary agent to champion your writing to publishers. Spend some time with MacGregor & Luedeke literary agent Elisa Saphier, who will dive into the nitty-gritty of the querying process and what's expected from your manuscript (fiction) or proposal (non-fiction). What does a literary agent do for you? Why do (or don't) you need one? What's a pitch and how do you write an eye-catching one? And, possibly most importantly, when do you know you're ready to start querying?

Info: In this class, we will explore examples of Sequential Poems and then write our own. Who says we can't write a multi-part poem in about an hour?? Not us! Join me in exploring this expansive form and the expansive humans that we are.

Info: Are you hearing voices? Harness them and come to this workshop! Dialogue is the soul of a good narrative and one of the ways in which you can distinguish your voice—or voices—from robot writing. In this workshop we will explore how dialogue creates action. We will also talk about ways to make your characters unique, and how you can discover and create characters through found dialogue. Bring a notebook because we will be doing some generative exercises!

Info: Every year when the flowers start blooming, the sky breaks open with bursts of blistering blue, the coyotes and frogs begin to compete for choral competition in the evening air, I feel it happening again, my body turning toward creation. This flash creative nonfiction workshop we will seek to use the grounding sensations of nature to examine our own personal narratives in short bite sized chunks. Using works like Justin Hocking’s A Field Guide to the Subterranean, Kyo Maclear’s Birds Art Life and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, we will discover how parts can come together to equal a tapestry as rich and complicated as the story of our lives. Through close reading, guided generative writing prompts and optional sharing we will flood the page with our own joys and griefs and devastating loves.

Info: Full title: Writing from the Margins: How to Get Published When You Don't Come from Privilege.

In this workshop Rene Denfeld—who has sold five novels to a big publisher, earning awards and bestseller titles—will tell us how to get published if you come from a less-than-privileged background. She'll share her own story of how she went from being a homeless kid to a successful author, and offer direct, practical advice for getting your work into the hands of publishers and readers. The class will include a Q&A so bring your questions, too!

Rene Denfeld is the award-winning, bestselling author of five novels, including the USA bestseller The Child Finder and the forthcoming The Talking Bone, inspired by her justice work exonerating innocents. She has been the recipient of many awards for her books and advocacy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is the proud parent of kids from foster care.

Info: This workshop is for the introverts, the anxious, the writers who see a microphone in front of a sea of chairs and think, "eeek!" Using improv techniques, a bit of mindfulness, and a lot of community support, Mo will help you choose what to read for performance and give you time, space and optional feedback to practice reading your work, whether you are promoting a book, want to get involved with local readings, or just want to work on your public speaking skills. This will be a welcoming space to try new things, be brave, and maybe fail, though Mo does not believe that anyone can truly fail reading their work in front of a crowd. Bring up to two pages of prose or poetry to read, and be prepared to be someone else's supportive audience member. Extroverts welcome, too.

Info: What is the role of poetry in an environmental crisis? Can a poetics of ecstasy, through decentering the self, move us toward the care and action our current moment requires? In this educational and generative session, we’ll look at several poems that reimagine the space between ecstasy, environmentalism, and ethics and discuss the limits and possibilities of language within each. After studying how ecopoets resist the logic of violence, you’ll respond with your own writing. Together, we’ll explore how responsibility to each other can be a kind of ecstasy that removes us from our illusions of control and moral purity, creating space for desire and grief to exist alongside.

Info: In October, 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec spent three days in a café in Paris, observing nothing in particular and recording it in his notebook: buses, people, passing cars, pigeons. Perec called these ordinary observations infra-ordinary, or a kind of ordinary observed so closely that it becomes transcendent. In this generative writing workshop, we’ll consider what it means to exhaust a subject with our attention, attune ourselves to what’s in front of us and write toward noticing what often goes unnoticed. Laura will also offer some ordinary-transcendent moments from the streets of Portland that come from fifteen years of operating a mobile library for people living outside.

Info: What makes a villain? All stories include adversaries, those people who become obstacles to the memoirist’s story in some way, perhaps even challenging their survival. Too often in unpublished manuscripts, though, the adversary lacks depth, backstory, and believability—causing agents to click the reject button. The skilled memoirist’s task, then, is to write the
adversary in three dimensions.

With a mix of story science, examples from the masters, and psychology, this session will provide practical lessons to write your memoir with true tension, depth of character, and gripping plot points.

Info: In this workshop, Forest Avenue publisher Laura Stanfill will discuss ways to get your book into print. Unsure if your manuscript is ready for prime time? Trying to figure out whether to find an agent or submit to a small press? How do you figure out who to submit to? What does book distribution matter? We’ll go over the basics and include plenty of time for questions and conversation. Submitting your work and fielding rejections takes courage. Laura has been publishing literary fiction and the occasional memoir since 2012, and she’s also a published novelist with a new book due out in November.

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Host or Publisher Alyssa Callahan