Past Events

Driftless Writing Center and five Vernon County public libraries are delighted to host the 8th Annual Vernon County Reads adult reading program, featuring Wisconsin author Jennifer Chiaverini at the Westby Performing Arts Center.

Residents are encouraged to visit their local public library to explore Chiaverini’s works, including her latest release from the Elm Creek Quilts series,The Museum of Lost Quilts. Chiaverini has published thirty-three novels including critically acclaimed historical fiction and the Elm Creek Quilts series.

The event on November 20th is free of charge and will feature a  presentation by Jennifer Chiaverini, followed by a book signing where  copies of her works will be available for purchase.

Click Here to Register

In this generative writing workshop, we'll read and discuss brief  excerpts of poetry and prose, and we'll use those discussions to inform  our generative writing exercises. This class is adaptable to any genre, including hybrid writing, and participants will have the option to work  on one longer piece or several shorter pieces. Participants are also  welcome to bring a draft of a work-in-progress to edit and grow! We will  focus on language, POV, character/conflict, setting, sound, and form.  Everyone can expect to walk away with some new writing and fresh ideas  on how to keep going. Writers of all levels welcome. 

Margaret Yapp is the author of Green for Luck (EastOver  Press, 2024). She works as the managing editor at Prompt Press and runs  Rampage Party Press. You can read more at Margaret’s website which is  margaret yapp dot com / instagram @bigbabymarg.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum (WTAW Press, 2023) and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here (MG Press, 2017). He's a founding editor of Cutleaf, a literary journal. More info at keithlesmeister.com.

Margaret Yapp is from Iowa City, Iowa. She works as the managing editor at  Prompt Press and runs Rampage Party Press, an ongoing hand-printed  broadside project and poetry magazine. She has an MFA in poetry from the  Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently an MFA candidate at the  University of Iowa Center for the Book. Her debut book of poems, Green for Luck,  is out now from EastOver Press. You can read more at Margaret’s website  which is margaret yapp dot com / instagram @bigbabymarg.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum (WTAW Press, 2023) and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here (MG Press, 2017). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, december magazine, Gettysburg Review, New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, Redivider, SLICE, Terrain.org, and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in The Good Men Project, River Teeth, Sycamore Review, Tin House Open Bar, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars and serves as editor of Cutleaf. A 2023-25 Rural Regenerator Fellow through Springboard for the Arts, he currently lives in Iowa’s Driftless region.

Sign Up to read at the open mic!
If you would like to read during the open mic portion, please email the Driftless Writing Center at driftlesswritingcenter@gmail.com with the subject line “in-person open mic” to sign up for a 5-minute slot.  This is an in-person event.

Click here to register.

Those of us who consider ourselves more “organic” writers might hate the idea of knowing where we’re going—the journey to find out can be so dramatic or romantic! But it’s good practice to play with the idea of writing  toward a predetermined ending, a process which may reveal some new ways to order our thinking, refine our writing process, and to expand our creativity.

Recommended for writers of prose (fiction or nonfiction) and hybrid shorter forms or writers that would like to experiment with those forms in this workshop.

Sliding scale tuition ($20-$50); scholarships are also available

Jennifer Morales (any human pronoun) is the author of Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories (U of Wisconsin Press 2015), which was chosen by the Wisconsin Center for the Book as the 2016 Wisconsin Book of the Year. A collection of interconnected short stories about life in a hyper-segregated Rust Belt city, Meet Me Halfway was a finalist for the Midwest Book Award and won an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, among other honors.

Jennifer earned their MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Los Angeles in 2011. Recent publications include “The Boy Without a Bike,” in Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime (Akashic 2019), edited by Joyce Carol Oates and written at her request; “Wiseacres,” which took second place in the Wisconsin People and Ideas fiction contest; and “The Doorman,” published in the cli fi anthology Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene (Black Lawrence 2021), which won the Zona Gale Short Fiction Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

If you would like to read at the open mic, please send an email with the  subject line: IN-PERSON OPEN MIC, and your name and contact information.  Please bring no more than 5 minutes of material to share.

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Join Driftless Writing Center for a reading by the poet Elizabeth Hoover, author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Poetry Prize.

Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Crab Orchard Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others.

Her creative nonfiction has been published by the North American Review, the Kenyon Review, and Lunch Ticket and received the StoryQuarterly Essay Prize. She reviews books, interviews authors, and writes about art and pop culture for such publications as Bitch, Paper, The Art Newspaper, and the Washington Post.

She is an Assistant Professor of English at Webster University in St. Louis, where she teaches such classes as Archival Poetics and LGBTQ+ Literature.

Open mic to follow. Please bring no more than 5 minutes of work to share.

Registration is limited. To register, click here.

Come play in the Vernon County archives with poet Elizabeth Hoover!

In this generative workshop, we will experiment with writing poetry in concert with archival research. We will read the work of three poets who engage in archival research, meaning research that involves handling primary source materials like letters, diaries, photographs, and recordings, among others. In addition, we will write our own poetry using archival objects as a source of inspiration.

Central questions the workshop will explore include: How can research be a part of your creative and poetic practice? How does working with archival material contribute to the invention of new poetic forms?  How does archival research take on different significance when it is filtered through a poetic viewpoint? What happens to our own poetic practice if we privilege exploratory research and deliberately seek out sources of inspiration?

NOTE: Because we will be working with the museum’s collections, please don’t bring food or drink with you to this event. We will have hot drinks in the breakroom available. We will also be writing with pencils or you are welcome to bring a laptop or tablet to write with, but no ink writing implements, please.

Isaac Pickell will give a free, in-person reading of his work followed by a community open mic and a brief Q&A session with Pickell. If you would like to read during the open mic portion, please email the Driftless Writing Center at driftlesswritingcenter@gmail.com with the subject line “open mic” to sign up for a 5-minute slot. The open mic is limited to 10 participants, so email now to claim your spot.

About Isaac Pickell:

Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet, PhD candidate, and adjunct instructor in Detroit, and a graduate of Miami University's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. He is the author of two collections of poetry, everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and It’s not over once you figure it out (Black Ocean, 2023), and his recent work can be found in Brevity, Copper Nickel, FENCE, Passages North, and Poetry Daily. Isaac’s taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to. Check out what he's writing today at isaacpickell.substack.com.

Registration is limited. To register, click here.

The Driftless Writing Center is delighted to host an in-person generative poetry workshop led by lauded poet Isaac Pickell—titled “Mining the Everyday to Make Your Story Heard.” The workshop will be held at the Vernon County Historical Society Museum in Viroqua, Wisconsin, on November 4, 2023.

About Isaac Pickell’s workshop:

Part of the brilliance of poetry is its ability to take the everyday and make it sparkle, uncovering the magic in the quotidian experiences we all share. But the other side of poetry is just as important: its ability to uncover truths we may be unable or unwilling to access without it. In this generative session, through invention writing and a focus on detail, we will work together to find those things we know in our hearts but keep close to the vest, discover the stories we've been waiting a lifetime to tell.

About Isaac Pickell:

Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet, PhD candidate, and adjunct instructor in Detroit, and a graduate of Miami University's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. He is the author of two collections of poetry, everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and It’s not over once you figure it out (Black Ocean, 2023), and his recent work can be found in Brevity, Copper Nickel, FENCE, Passages North, and Poetry Daily. Isaac’s taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to. Check out what he's writing today at isaacpickell.substack.com.

Natasha Oladokun will give a free, in-person reading of her work followed by a community open mic and a brief Q&A session with Oladokun. 

If you would like to read during the open mic portion, please email the Driftless Writing Center at driftlesswritingcenter@gmail.com with the subject line “open mic” to sign up for a 5-minute slot. The open mic is limited to 10 participants, so email now to claim your spot.

About Natasha Oladokon:

Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.

Registration is limited. To register, click here. 

The Driftless Writing Center is delighted to host an in-person workshop led by lauded poet Natasha Oladokun, the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her workshop—titled “Abracadabra! The Poem as Prayer and Conjuring”—will be held at the Vernon County Historical Society Museum in Viroqua, Wisconsin, on September 23, 2023.

About Natasha Oladokun’s workshop:

W.H. Auden once wrote in a poem, “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying….” But what if this is only half the story? Images and lines, meter and music—these craft elements are essential to the making of a poem. And yet, poems and lyric are more than their individual parts. Poems are acts and invocations. They’re expressions of desire, or confessions of fear or ecstasy, and they’re a powerful way of naming and bringing something imagined yet unrealized into existence. In poems, you build the world. It’s what you do as a writer: abracadabra, create as you speak.

In this workshop we’ll read and talk about work by poets who invite the spiritual and metaphysical into the world of their poems—poets who wield language, story, and lyric as deftly as a wand. We’ll look at poems that pray and poems that argue, poems that don’t shy away from naming what they want. And we’ll spend some time writing our own poems together, too. No prior experience is required for this workshop—all that’s needed is a sense of fun, curiosity, and a little bit of faith in the magic of language.

About Natasha Oladokun:

Natasha Oladokun is a Black, queer poet and essayist from Virginia. She holds fellowships from Cave Canem, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Jackson Center for Creative Writing, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the inaugural First Wave Poetry fellow. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Academy of American Poets, Kenyon Review Online, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is working on her first collection of poems.