“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.
(more…)Of course the mundane is generative!
At the 2026 Festival, Gary Copeland Lilley read from his 2025 collection Raven on the Moaner’s Bench and invited us to Steal Time to Write!
A great many of us are from families whose people had jobs. We’ve worked the farms, the diners, and the factories. In the work of creating story within the narrative frame of poems, stories, and spoken-word ballads, where mundane details provide a surprisingly powerful understatement, the character speaks of that individual’s unique voice and region and how the tone reveals a self-perception of the speaker within the narrative of an ordinary days, nothing special of the work-week. The task is to create a list of mundane things, that someone in your family might have done or might do. (Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily have to be factual).
EXAMPLE: Riding With the Dragon
Every 15 minutes a cigarette flies
from the cab, sparking in the night air stream
on the driver side of the rig. I’m in the shotgun seat
of a Freightliner diesel. Console between us,
the eight-track and a stack of maps, a spilled
carton of Marlboros, one half-empty pack.
I check my old man’s profile in the approaching lights,
the sag in his face, an oil stained ballcap,
the red tip of a cigarette pulling toward his mouth
as he runs the road with his window down.
His left hand on the wheel, right on the stick,
he can drive this steel in his sleep.
Now, post your 100-150 word draft in the comments…