Are you an Oregon playwright?

Fantastic. Do this now: submit your application to Literary Arts for the Oregon Literary Fellowships. It costs nothing to apply; application is E-Z; and if you’re selected you get a nice chunk of change and probably a serious career boost along with it. The deadline for application is June 24 (not a postmark deadline, by the by).

Genres up for awards include poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, drama, and young readers literature. Which I mention because of all the genres, playwriting is, for some reason, still not on the radar of Oregon’s burgeoning playwriting community. Hence your chances of grabbing the brass ring are much, much greater, statistically, than if you submitted, say, literary fiction.

Questions? All the coaching you could ever need can be found at Paper Fort, an excellent writer’s resource created by the fabulous Susan Denning.

What you are waiting for, get off the interwebs and starting crafting that application. You’ve got nothing to lose but your undeserved obscurity.



And if you still need encouragement, here’s a little Alice Cooper to inspire you to take action:

Slouching toward spring in Portlandia

Just 28 hours to go till the equinox, at this writing — but hey, who’s counting. It's been spring here for weeks, as evidenced by the number of trees in my neighborhood that are now completely swathed in neon green moss.

By way of celebrating the changing tides of the seasons, here is a poem by Portland icon Susan Denning — she of the tremendously useful resource for writers called Paper Fort, as well as the online literary magazine, Caffeine Destiny.

For more of Susan’s work, visit her page at Inknode. And celebrate the return of light with us.



NO ONE KNOWS HER

Tell her wait, little interrupter. Why bother
she is slow. She is field hungry, moving
to the edge of the garden, where she wants
to stay and stay. Spring on its way, why listen.
She is solidly hers. Ducks overhead and the sky
a speckled target. A suggestion of owls in the trees.
The trees repeat her name. How the trees insist.
The birdbath unfreezes, the ground sprouts
and shifts. Tell her back to the house with its curtains
and floors. Tell her dress the paper dolls in leaves,
give them paper knives and forks. Stand them on the counter.
Tell her lovely, little negotiator. She would rather gather
mice. She has had it with the roses. How the bugs persist.
Tell her she can wish for goats eating up the weeds—
she can hope for rabbits. Deer lingering by the fence.
She wants her animals near. She wants the only sound
to be their movements. Call her steady. Tell her resist.