“Steal Time to Write” is a self-guided festival activity that has become a participant favorite. Each year, we ask the festival presenters to create a writing prompt based on the festival theme. These prompts are presented as letterpress printed cards that can be collected at various locations around the festival. But stealing time to write—as a community—is something we’d like to do all year long. So we’ve created this space to do just that. We will be publishing prompts from previous festivals each month and inviting you to share your writing to those prompts in the comments section.
Comments will be moderated and posted at the organizing committee’s discretion. No hate speech or promotion of violence will be posted. This should go without saying, but no AI-assisted works, please.
all the things that can burn you on this shift
I hope everyone had a good Labor Day! Since the 2026 Clatskanie Raymond Carver Writing Festival theme was WORK, this seemed the appropriate time to kick off our online Steal Time to Write.
Marj Hogan led a very successful—and packed—writing workshop at the 2026 Festival. She provides this month’s featured prompts:
After your thousandth hour at this task…
Because the tools I needed never arrived…
When I can’t clock out …
I wanted so badly to be good at …
A list of all the things that can burn you on this shift
Please share a bit of writing based on one of the prompts above.
Comments will be moderated, so there may be a delay in when your comment posts. This should go without saying, but we will not publish hate speech or AI-assisted work.
Thanks for joining our community in Stealing Time to Write!