The Raymond Carver Writing Festival will be offering a free writing workshop with Marj Hogan, held at the Clatskanie Cultural Center from 2:30-3:30pm. Registration is appreciated, but not required.
At the workshop Marj will lead a warm-up exercise and then approach writing poetry about work using two different strategies. To prepare you might: (a) create or find a transcript of you or someone else describing their daily work (paid or unpaid), (b) do nothing at all.
Some questions it might be fun to think about in advance:
What have your various jobs given you?
What have they taken from you?
How has your body changed because of your labor?
What language and skills do you have that someone outside of your work does not have?
About the workshop leader:
Marj Hogan lives in Portland, OR, and teaches Spanish at Union High School. She received the 2025 Astoria Writers’ Guild Writer-in-Residence to begin a series of poems about labor: what we do for work, how it shapes us, how it consumes and fails to define us. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Voicecatcher; 3Elements; Pretty Owl; High Shelf; Paperbark; Cold Mountain; and A Lantern, Radical Light/Linterna, Luz Radical, among others.