In the spring of this year, I checked in with several Pacific Northwest writers to hear about what they were working on.

It was an interesting mix.

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OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An Occasional Series

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Daniel Nieh was deep into a novel, his third: It’s set in the service industry and explores the subject of unconditional love. Jaye Nasir also worked on a novel, plowing into the home stretch of a manuscript she’d spent an inordinate amount of time with on the front end. Both writers are from Portland.

On the other side of the Columbia, Armin Tolentino of Vancouver, Wash., was editing poems that contemplate the nexus of fishing and mental health, along with one other project.

Finally, two writers from Seattle: Alexa Peters — like me, an arts journalist — was working on her chunk of a book she’s co-authoring on the history of that city’s jazz scene. Ren Cedar Fuller, meanwhile, has an essay collection coming out this October, and she was working on another her publisher asked for to promote it in advance of publication.

Quite a variety spanning form and genre, but these writers had something in common. For a few weeks in late March and early April, they worked on their projects at the Atticus Hotel in downtown McMinnville. They were among the more than two dozen writers, authors, poets and journalists who were selected for a new artist-in-residency program launched last fall.

The hotel is collaborating with the Linfield University Creative Writing Department on the program, with students there reviewing and scoring applicants’ submissions. During their stay, resident writers are then invited to the campus across town to do a reading, or perhaps participate in a workshop.

It was, by all accounts, successful, so Year Two is in the works: The luxury hotel just opened the application window for the 2025-26 season. Residencies run from Nov. 15 through April 1, with 4-day, 1-week and 2-week slots available that accommodate writers’ lifestyles and availability. The deadline is July 31.

“This has just been like the best feel-good experience of all time ever,” Atticus owner Erin Stephenson told me as she swept through the lobby one day when I was talking to writers in the lobby.

The $6 million hotel, with 36 rooms filling four floors on the corner of Fourth and Ford streets, opened early in 2018. Stephenson and partner Brian Shea built it to accommodate the region’s exploding wine tourism industry. Like every business, it took a hit during the pandemic, which had the unfortunate effect of delaying the writer residency program that Stephenson had hoped to get going in 2020.

Giving authors a leg up, she said, was always part of the plan, because the Atticus (that’s Latin for “classy”) was conceived as both lodging for tourists and an arts and culture hub. When I held the first table read for a play I have in pre-production for Gallery Theater (just one block south of the hotel) the Atticus hosted us in their Board Room meeting space one Saturday morning last February.

“There really is a strong literary current in the community,” Stephenson said. “We just hadn’t had the opportunity to lean into it yet.”

The Atticus leaned hard into local art when it was built. In the lobby, the centerpiece is a walnut showcase by John Basile, a replica of a display the Walnut Club of McMinnville commissioned for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Nearby is a photo of Jacob Calvin Cooper, cracking a walnut on the original display; he’s featured in the same pose in a painting by Marilyn Affolter on an adjacent wall.

Each of the 36 suites, meanwhile, features artwork by locals, including Zach Hixon, Kathleen Buck, Sepha Nisbet, Carmen Borrase and Phyllice Bradner, among others. Local residents picked favorite books to furnish the rooms, and now there’s a growing mini-library of novels, story and poetry collections and chapbooks by writers who land a residency there.

That book collection may be found in the “hidden” Drawing Room, which is behind the front desk in the lobby. It’s a cozy space available for community rental, with an 1892 fireplace from Pike School in Yamhill. The walls feature elegant, gold-leafed silhouettes of McMinnville residents, and also some erasure poems — one of which, I realized when the Atticus opened and I was among the nearly 2,000 locals who toured the place, was created using one of my own stories, written years earlier for the McMinnville News-Register.

It’s this room — the door to which one might assume leads to a far less glamorous work space or storage area for hotel staff — where the Portland novelist Nieh set up shop to write.

He started his days with some stretching and meditation, followed by a quad — a double espresso.

“I drink that and stare out the window, then I put all my notebooks and computer in my backpack and come down here for about four hours,” he said, adding that he alternated between working on a laptop and writing longhand.

“My game plan was to come here and go deep into the novel that I’m working on,” he said. “Writing a novel requires holding a lot of things in mind at once, because there’s just so many parts. I’m part-way through my third novel, so I felt like a residency was a way to sequester myself from the ten thousand woodpeckers of everyday life. It’s so easy to not work on a novel. Everyone’s really good at not working on a novel.”

Nieh had a 12-day stint of writing that he termed “both a challenge and a luxury.” One of the delights, he found, was time to read. He finished reading two books by Portland authors Chelsea Baker and Karen Russell, the latter of which he picked up a couple of blocks down the street in McMinnville, at Third Street Books.

“Having the luxury to read for like an hour and a half or two hours a day, that’s what feels like a treat,” he said.

Creating space for reading is encouraged at the Atticus. This year, Stephenson started opening the lobby one night a week for quiet reading. Locals were invited to bring a book and settle into one of the big sofas or chairs for a couple hours of quiet book time.

Tolentino, the poet from Vancouver, thought that was the coolest thing.

“There were four of us writers just hanging out reading, and there were people from the community there,” he said. “It was really lovely, people just hanging out and reading, just quietly sharing space together that way.”

Like Nieh, Tolentino started his day with some meditation to get centered. Then he journaled for about 20 minutes before switching to his writing.

“What I didn’t realize would be a barrier is the television,” he chuckled. “I’m not used to having a TV around. You can turn on the TV at any point, and Seinfeld is on, like, eight hours of Seinfeld straight. So there were some hurdles to navigate.”

Tolentino, a past poet laureate of Clark County, brought some finished poems with him for editing. Many of them are about fishing and mental health, and he wants to make sure they will “hang together” in a collection. He also worked on a children’s book about Filipino mythology.

Art is the subject of a book that another writer, Peters, spent her time working on. She’s about 15,000 words into an essay that she started in January for the book on Seattle jazz.

Peters has done residencies elsewhere before, and acknowledged that it can be tough to hit the ground writing upon arriving in new digs. Once she found her stride, her day started around 8:30 a.m. with coffee and breakfast in her room, and then writing for a couple hours.

“Then I take a break,” she said. “I take a lot of breaks to walk.”

Walking breaks were something that Fuller, the Seattle essayist, found essential. Her stay at the Atticus was her first writing residency, so it was a rare opportunity to have a schedule completely cleared for writing.

“I was going to write for six hours a day, divided into two-hour chunks, because I need to get some exercise in there,” she said when I dropped by one afternoon in April. “The other day I was so invested in writing that I put in more than that. It might have been eight hours, and that’s not healthy, to be sitting for that period of time. So I went back to my plan and put a timer on; I write for two hours, and that’s it; then I get outside.”

Fuller’s essay collection is set for publication this fall, and about half of the pieces are about raising a transgender child — now grown and happy. She wrote them at a time when “it felt like the world was getting better for trans people.” As that’s no longer the case, Fuller said she wondered whether it was safe to publish such a book. Everyone she talked to was supportive, and urged her to get it out there.

“My publisher asked if I’d consider writing about that as an essay,” she said. “All of us in the arts now, we have to choose to be brave, right? So that’s what I’m writing about. I ended up finishing the essay, and tonight a group of us, the four of us who are residents right now, we’re going to meet and have a reading of the things we did this week, so I’ll have a chance to share that essay.”

Nasir, the Portland novelist, was at the Atticus just five days, but she took advantage of the time to get off the treadmill of continually rewriting the first half to three-fourths of a novel-in-progress and dive into the final stretch.

“I finally started writing that part of the plot I’ve never written before,” she said. “I’m finally moving into this uncharted territory, the beginning of the end, which feels good.”

“I wasn’t sure about residencies to begin with because I do feel like I’ve set up my life to write, but there’s something about meeting other writers,” she continued. “I love creative community, and I spent most of my life not being that way. Only in the last few years have I openly identified as ‘A Writer,’ and talked about that.”

All told, the experiences described by these resident writers spell out “Mission Accomplished” for Stephenson. The project was conceived as an answer to the question: “What can we do to help people connect?” she said. “What can we do to help people who make art for people to enjoy and get lost in?”

“We weren’t sure what to expect, and then we received so many applications,” she continued. “It was so heartening to see so many applications come in from so many writers from so many walks of life.” 

“There’s such a generosity of the people here,” Tolentino said. “I mean, they’re literally giving you something of monetary value, but there’s a kindness, like they’re really rooting for you. They want to nurture art here; it’s really lovely that way.”