First Draft Writers’ Series
Third Thursday of each month, always FREE

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Check out the list of esteemed writers who have headlined First Draft since 2013.
Become a Friend of First Draft HERE.

 

Ursula LeGuin reading at First Draft.

The First Draft Writers’ Series brings authors and poets of note to the Pendleton stage to share new work. On the third Thursday of each month people who love the written word gather at the PCA’s Pearson Auditorium to hear our featured authors as well as three to five minute open mic readings by local emerging writers.

“Truly, [First Draft] was one of the best adventures of my writing career, right up there with winning the PNBA awards and being interviewed by Studs Turkel.”   – Craig Lesley

 

Open Mic

Our Open Mic readers add incredible life to First Draft. Whether you’re a professional, emerging literary artist, amateur or just get a burst of inspiration to write one thing, we’d love to have you read your original 3-5 minute piece for the audience. Up to ten people can sign up each month to share their work after the featured author and a quick Q&A. Just send us a note in the Zoom chat that you’d like to read.

UP NEXT

Join us for a reading with Charles Goodrich

Thursday, October 17, 2024
7:00 p.m. in person at PCA and via Zoom!
(ZOOM Link Here) 

 “Weave Me a Crooked Basket is the good news we’ve been waiting for: community matters, love heals, care and attention are the greatest of gifts, art is wonderfully re-arranging, the rich soil, well-tended, holds us all, and the work, despite our griefs, goes on. Charles Goodrich has written an exceptionally beautiful, life-giving novel.” —Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky

           “I haven’t read a novel in a long time that felt this hopeful, this authentic in feeling, in landscape, in the complexities of the lives of its people—ordinary people who are not only farmers and gardeners but artists and biologists and immigrants, wives and husbands, sisters and brothers.  It’s a marvelous book, written with immense compassion and honesty, insight and detail. I loved it.”

—Molly Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses

After a long career as a professional gardener, Charles Goodrich worked for more than a decade with the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University. Charles is the author of four volumes of poetry— Watering the Rhubarb; A Scripture of CrowsGoing to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; and Insects of South Corvallis—and a book of narrative essays, The Practice of Home. His first novel, Weave Me a Crooked Basket, was published by University of Nevada Press in 2023. He writes and gardens near the confluence of the Marys and Willamette Rivers in the traditional homeland of the Ampinefu Band of the Kalapuya in Corvallis, Oregon.

 

 

 

 

Coming Soon:

October – Charles Goodrich

November – Chris Anderson (Zoom only)

December – TBA