Students started arriving at Woodburn High School’s gymnasium about 7:30 a.m. on the first Saturday in May, carrying pens, notebooks, and stories they’d written, stories that served as an admission ticket, of sorts, to the all-day event about to begin inside the sprawling, otherwise empty school. 

Ranging in age from 10 to 18, the roughly 330 young people from all over the state had come not for a basketball or volleyball game, but for a day of creative work. 

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THE ART OF LEARNING: An occasional series

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The few who spoke as they straggled toward the building did so quietly — a sharp contrast with the scene seven hours later, when students burst into the afternoon sunshine chattering excitedly, radiating energy, and jazzed to be in the company of new friends and fellow travelers.

This is the Oregon Writing Festival, marking its 40th anniversary.

After everyone signed in and was seated, Tim Gillespie, a retired educator who with colleague Rick Hardt has been running this show since 1985, took to the podium in the middle of the gym and welcomed participants, some accompanied by parents and teachers. 

He asked for a show of hands: Who was attending the festival for the first time?

Most of the hands went up.

Organizers estimate that since its inception, more than 35,000 students have attended the writing festival, which gives young writers from around Oregon a chance to hang with authors and poets such as Jane Yolen, Paulann Petersen, Eric Kimmel, Eloise Jarvis McGraw, Gary Soto, and Roland Smith. For most of the run, the festival was held on the Portland State University campus. It averaged 870 attendees per year and peaked in 1999 with more than 1,000 students. 

But times have changed. 

A couple of months before the 2020 event, the pandemic shut down the world and the festival along with it. Organizers pivoted to a less-than-satisfying virtual event for the next two years, before the festival finally returned in 2023, relocating to Woodburn with considerably diminished numbers. This year, 332 students signed up for a Saturday of writing.

Still, 300-plus kids, along with attendant parents and teachers, managed to fill the bleachers on one side of the gym. As I watched the bustle of settling in, Hardt strolled by and I caught his attention.

“This looks epic to me,” I said. “But given what you’ve had in years past, I imagine that this must seem small.”

“Very small,” Hardt acknowledged. “So many teachers retired during COVID, and you’ve got to have teachers; you need those contacts in the schools. We’re rebuilding. We are starting over.”

As the stands filled, Hardt consulted briefly with the nurse who would be on hand for the day, along with some of the so-called red-vesters — adults, some of them from his own family, wearing red vests and carrying walkie-talkies. They are the assistants and trouble-shooters students are advised to approach if they have a question or problem. One was assigned to me, and we traded phone numbers — just in case I got lost. Given the size of Woodburn High School, this wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. 

A few minutes before Gillespie delivered his opening remarks, he walked up and Hardt introduced me, jabbing a finger toward his friend as if to illustrate how all this came together.

“This is the guy,” Hardt said.

No,” Gillespie said, pointing back at him. “He’s the guy.”

Hardt smiled and shook his head. “He’s the guy.”

They laughed.

“We’ve both been doing this for 40 years,” Gillespie said. 

Soon, he was at the podium, addressing a crowd that — for a generation some say has social-media-addled brains — was remarkably attentive. He impressed upon them the agency and power that writing gives:

“You have a chance to tell a story from your life that explains to the world who you are, a poem that captures some truth or beauty just the way you see it, or a fictional world, maybe. A funny tale that gives the gift of laughter, a letter to the editor. This can all be writing that’s never been seen before, that’s uniquely yours. AI is handy for patching some things together, I guess, but we don’t need recycled writing. We need you. We need the voices of young writers.”

BORN OF A ‘GRIPE SESSION’

The Oregon Writing Festival was conceived in 1983 during what Gillespie called “a gripe session” he had with a fellow teacher in Portland. A language arts specialist who had just gone to work for the Multnomah Education Service District, Gillespie was chatting with a Portland teacher (the late Mary Bothwell) about how writing was taught — or rather, wasn’t taught. 

For most of the 20th century, writing instruction in public schools was limited to the nuts and bolts of the craft: grammar, punctuation, spelling, diagramming sentences, etc. Gillespie uses a sports analogy to highlight the folly: It was like drilling football players in blocking and tackling but never turning them loose to play a game.

But in the early 1980s, teachers nationwide caught a pedagogical wave that originated in the late 1970s in Southern California. The National Writing Project was the brainchild of Bay Area teachers who, similarly discouraged, steered the teaching of writing back to the actual practice of it, from the initial brainstorming of ideas, to outlining and organizing, to the writing of drafts, editing, and rewriting “to get kids composing more often,” Gillespie said.

At the time, Oregon had a statewide spelling bee that was broadcast on radio, which provided the spark. “What I said was, ‘Mary, what we need is a state writing bee.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, but it can’t be competitive where there’s one winner and a lot of disappointed losers. It needs to be something celebratory, but instructive in the process.’ So I said, ‘Yeah, we need a state writing festival.’ That was the seed that got us all fired up.”

In that sense, Gillespie was “the guy” who started the festival, but Hardt — also a language arts teacher who at the time headed the Oregon Council of Teachers of English — was brought in almost immediately. “Mary and I may have cooked up the idea,” Gillespie said, “but that guy has been the backbone of this thing for all these decades.” 

It took two years of planning and networking with English teachers statewide before the first festival launched in 1985 on the University of Oregon campus. Organizers expected around 300 students, but a thousand signed up, which in hindsight was one of those “good problems” to have. Among the authors Hardt and Gillespie snagged that first year was a young poet, future Oregon poet laureate Kim Stafford. 

The presence of published writers and poets at the festival isn’t lost on students, and in fact can be a coming-of-age highlight that is never forgotten. Cedar Goslin, who attended her first festival as an eighth-grader in 2005 and now works in a bookstore in Madras, recalled meeting Ricochet River author Robin Cody the first year she attended at the prompting of a teacher. “Just talking to someone who had written a book, and holding that book in my hands as I was talking to him, was a surreal experience for me as a 13-year-old,” she said. Since then, she has had her work published in newspapers and remains active with local writing groups. 

Organizers and teachers who head workshops have always known that the few hours they get these young writers each year can make a huge impression. “We realized, when we were at Portland State University,” said Hardt’s son, artist and red-vest captain Christopher Shotola-Hardt, “that some of these kids had never been in a building with an elevator.”

One student who will surely never forget the festival is Caleb Bishop, a 26-year-old social worker who lives in the Willamette Valley. To organizers’ knowledge, he’s the only student who attended annually from the first year he was eligible as a fourth-grader (as the event swelled, students in grades 1-3 were dropped in 2000) through his senior year in high school.

“I didn’t even realize there was a record to set,” he said when I gave him a call a few days after this year’s event. “At some point my friend and I — we were both in a book club together — were like, ‘We should just keep going!’ We knew how much fun it was. It was just so much fun. That’s what I remember.” He went on to get a degree in English from PSU and returned to the festival as a red-vester. Today, he is writing on Substack.   

‘THE LEVEL OF CREATIVITY IS ASTOUNDING’ 

Following a short opening ceremony and for the rest of the day, students split into age groups: elementary-, middle- and high-schoolers. For the next six hours (including a lunch break during which they could buy books from piles loaded onto long tables set up in the cafeteria), they spent time in different settings: presentations by guest authors, workshops, and sharing sessions during which students were invited (but not required) to read aloud work they’d prepared and comment on work they’d heard. A separate session was held for parents and other adults in tow.

This year, three of the four presenters for youth were festival veterans, with one, poet Carlos Reyes, having been there since the early UO days. Over the years, the changes in culture and technology, he said, have made for more of a “disconnect” with the older students, the cohort where changes in students themselves are most visible.

“Though I lead workshops in all age groups, including adults, my favorite age group of students is the unspoiled K-6-graders,” Reyes said. 

Years ago, he said, a second-grader in one of his workshops was puzzled by a writing prompt. “Mr. Reyes, we can’t do that,” the child said. “We’re only second-graders.”

“Sure you can,” Reyes replied. “Then he and the whole class proceeded to dive in and write like crazy, producing recognizable and startling poems.”

This year, a big draw for younger kids was first-time presenter Aron Nels Steinke, whose career began as an elementary school teacher before he started making comic books in 2005 with the help of a grant from the Xeric Foundation. As a teacher, the creator of the Mr. Wolf’s Class series attended a few of the festivals himself with his students and sometimes led workshops. 

“Back then, I’d always watch the keynote speakers and dream about one day being asked to deliver one myself,” he said. “I’ve always been so impressed with the enthusiasm of the students. They are just thrilled to be in a community of aspiring writers and storytellers, and it just feels wonderful to be around that. The level of creativity is astounding.”

Middle-school students this year were turned loose with another Portland author, the fantastically prolific Bart King, whose nearly three dozen young adult books include The Big Book of Boy Stuff, Time Travel Inn, and The Drake Equation, to name just a few. A repeat presenter, King titled his seemingly stream-of-consciousness talk I Like Turtles, behind which lay the famous meme that was apparently a Portland original: The now 17-year-old viral clip shows an adolescent boy at a festival in Portland’s Waterfront Park, where he’d had his face painted like a zombie. 

A KGW reporter covering the event put him in front of the camera and led with: “Back here, live at the Waterfront Village, with my friend, the zombie. Jonathan, you’re looking good! Jonathan just got an awesome face paint job! What do you think?”

Jonathan’s reply: “I like turtles!”

“I needed something snappy for a title, and the last thing I wanted was some pablum about ‘following your dreams,’” King told me before his presentation. He explained why he loves the video clip so much: 

“He is a turtle enthusiast, simple as that, and his advocacy of his own interests seemed so positive to me, that I’ve sort of turned it into my mantra for saying ‘yes’ to projects that I ordinarily might pass on.” Covertly, it’s also a veiled reference to the fact that King is writing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book. 

Finally, the high school students got an hour with Portland author Emily Suvada, a native of Australia and self-confessed science nerd. Suvada is the author of the successful Mortal Coil trilogy, a YA science-fiction thriller whose hero is a DNA hacker in a world brought to the brink by a horrifying plague that makes COVID look like the sniffles. 

I watched much of Suvada’s presentation, fascinated by her counsel that fiction writers think of stories through the lens of science. Writers, she said, shouldn’t think of their craft as a sculptor would a pile of clay, but as a scientist studying and making use of the millennia-old global ecosystem of Story.

Charles Darwin and the lesser known biologist Lynn Margulis each got their due, with their ideas applied to the process of how a narrative originates: Some evolve, while others emerge as a result of symbiotic mergers. Just as Mortal Coil’s Catarina Agatta is able to hack genes, Suvada said, writers ought to get in the mindset of working with the DNA of stories.

“This doesn’t mean that we don’t create new things,” she went on. Despite its being the first session of the morning, the students were not only laser-focused on her talk, but I also noticed there wasn’t a cellphone in sight. “We can cross-pollinate, we can graft trees together, we can even genetically engineer and have flowers that glow in the dark. It’s very different from thinking of yourself as working with lifeless clay. It’s a fundamental shift in the way that you think about stories.” 

DOG-FOOD TASTING AND JACK AND JILL

The cost to attend the Oregon Writing Festival is $40 per student, with most of the money coming from individual schools’ Talented and Gifted programs, though Hardt said those budgets took a hit after COVID. “We always say to every school,” he said, “if you have a kid who doesn’t have the money, send them anyway.”

It isn’t just a day of Adults Imparting Wisdom. It’s very much a collaborative event, and that comes out in both the back-and-forth banter following presentations and the sharing sessions and workshops.

King recalled his first time presenting about 10 years ago. 

“I was talking about the importance of sensory details in writing, and I asked students to think of some redolent or meaningful smells,” he said, adding that scatological ones were bypassed. “One student mentioned the aroma of dog food, which I agreed was a good one, but another student immediately averred that the taste of dog food would be an even better detail to catch the reader’s interest. It seemed clear to me that the student was speaking from experience, and since I am someone who has also ‘tried’ dog food, I found myself in an unlikely conversation about the culinary merits of dog food — from the stage, with a mic in my hand, and a few mildly aghast parents looking on.”

The workshops typically involve writing prompts. Trish Emerson, a retired teacher and current head of the Oregon Council of Teachers of English (OCTE), gave her first presentation when the festival returned to in-person last year and used the Mother Goose rhyme Jack and Jill. 

“I did a point-of-view thing,” she said. “I said, ‘OK, we have this moment happening, Jack and Jill going up the hill, but we have to have something before the story. Something happened there, too. Who was involved with that?’”

“Oh my God, the creative things they did!” she continued. “They came up with all these great scenarios. Some of the kids carried it to the hospital. The kids just do cool stuff with just a little thing if you set it up for them.” 

And then there’s sharing — students reading stories and poems they’ve prepared at home. These are the moments, teachers emphasize, when one is reminded of the unique personality type of writers and their relative anonymity. 

Most students who do something outside the classroom, they note, are visible. They play sports, wearing uniforms in front of a cheering crowd, or participate in theater, where they wear costumes on stage in front of an audience. The band kids are heard playing their instruments, choir kids are heard singing, but save for perhaps a spelling bee here and there, writers and poets are neither seen nor heard. Until they come here.

Gracie Foster is an eighth-grader at Wallowa Middle School in Northeast Oregon, and she attended her first festival this month. By her own account, she turned to writing “at a really dark time” in her life, as a way to express her feelings without talking. She brought two poems: Change, about a woman changing her view of a lover after seeing their true personality, and Pick Your Poison, which gets into how the surface of things can obscure a deeper meaning. 

“I was extremely nervous to read my writing aloud,” she said, noting that she was one of the only poets in her group. “My voice was trembling.” But seeing peers enjoy her work made her feel more secure. The sharing session, she said, was her favorite part of the festival. “I feel like everyone’s pieces in my group definitely reflected some of their soul in each chapter, paragraph, or stanza.” 

Holly Peartree, a speech and language pathologist from Lake Oswego, led one of these sharing sessions, and over lunch she marveled at the creativity and courage students brought.

“They were incredible,” she said. “It’s definitely a vulnerable space, and I think some of them were hesitant.” By the end of the day, though, everyone was relaxed, having discovered others their own age who write. “It’s just, you know, a really neat place to nerd out, really, a place where you can find your people.”

Down in Bonanza, about 25 miles east of Klamath Falls and a nearly six-hour drive from Woodburn, the middle and high schools are combined for a total of 225 students. English Language Arts teacher Heather Baldock was a presenter this year and also brought students. 

“All of the students who attended from Bonanza volunteered and then put in the work to write and edit their stories,” she said. “It is truly amazing that these students made time to make this work. It gives them a chance to be recognized for more than the traditional school activities as well as spend time with students who are doing the same.”

Most of the students attending this year were from the Portland area and Willamette Valley, but students from Bonanza and Wallowa were joined by peers from St. Helens, Pilot Rock, Siuslaw, and Redmond. Roughly half were in fourth and fifth grades, while the rest were evenly split between middle and high school age. In all, 20 districts were represented. 

“For a teacher, it’s hard to give up a Saturday,” said Karen Johnson, who sits on the OCTE board and does a presentation for adults during the festival. “But it’s also a little addictive, because the kids want to write. For a teacher, that’s a little bit of heaven, to have attentive kids who want to do what you’re asking them to do, and who want to share, and they’re happy.”

While quiet intensity seemed to reign in workshops and sharing sessions, the biggest expressions of happy came at lunch, which is where Kira and Rob Porton of A Children’s Place Bookstore in Portland had  books by all the presenting authors available along with other popular children’s and YA works. By the end of the day, the piles were considerably smaller. Some titles, including the first book in the Mortal Coil trilogy, sold out. 

“This was my favorite OWF in years,” Kira Porton said. “The energy felt like the old days, before the pandemic. The numbers of kids may not have been the same, but they wanted books! Many of them even wanted books instead of lunch.”

I happened to overhear one, a girl who moved away from the crowd and whipped out a cellphone for a call home: “There’s a lot of good books, and there are no snacks to buy, so can I use that money to buy books?” she asked. “There’s a new Percy Jackson book!”

A LIFE-LONG EFFECT

The Oregon Writing Festival, one of the longest-running events of its type in the nation, according to organizers, has its own entry in the Oregon Encyclopedia. Hardt wrote it, and in the piece he recalls a former student, Norah Palmer, who attended four festivals years ago. 

She’s married and living in Pennsylvania, Hardt said, and as this year’s festival approached, he got a note from her. She and her sister still talk about the keynote address the author Michael Hoy gave one year they attended. Another former student, he added, at the age of 48 wrote him a note and said that “all her life, her career choices go back to her experience as a kid in the writing festival.”

“It’s crazy, the effect this event has on kids,” he said. “It’s beyond description.”