Save October 7^th and 8^th (Thursday and Friday) 2010 for the 3^nd Annual POETRY WORKSHOP IN DUFUR, OREGON – THE MUSIC OF SURPRISE: Writing for the Ear as well as the Eye – Work with sound and rhythm to make your poems fresh and unexpected. Start new poems and take old poems a step further. Give yourself two days to fine tune your poetry. Come stay at the charming Balch Hotel in Dufur, Oregon, and practice a better ear for your own writing. Learn to manipulate meter and see what happens as you experiment with the flexible music of our rich English language.

The Music of Surprise is a two-day workshop full of sound-oriented writing prompts and radical revision of new and old material. We will spend one night (Thursday, October 7, 2010) at the hotel with no television or phones to distract us. There we will work in the beautiful parlor and in our own private rooms. On Thursday we will have lunch and dinner at the hotel plus an after-dinner reading just among ourselves followed by a brief homework assignment. Our Friday session will include breakfast and lunch.

The workshop will be limited to nine participants so that everyone gets time and attention. Cost for the workshop itself is $125 plus hotel and meals (both reasonable).

If you are interested, request a registration form and send two recent poems. For more information, please e-mail, phone, or write to: Penelope Scambly Schott at 507 NW Skyline Crest Road, Portland, Oregon 97229 — Phone: 503-291-0159,  e-mail: penelopeschott@comcast.net. Why have a workshop in Dufur? Because it’s a quiet little town with a view of the east side of Mount Hood and a charming small hotel (www.balchhotel.com) where we won’t be thinking our ordinary thoughts. (In case you’re curious, the town is named after Andrew & Enoch Dufur who came in 1859.) Where is Dufur? From Portland, drive out through the Columbia Gorge and turn south.  Dufur is twenty minutes south of Route 84 on 197.  It’s a beautiful trip. From the east side of Portland 1 hour 45 minutes (100 miles), from The Dalles 20 minutes (15 miles),from Bend 2 hours 30 minutes (115 miles), from Pendleton 2 hours 20 minutes (140 miles), from Salem 2 hours 35 minutes (150 miles)

Please mark your calendars — Saturday, September 18, from 1-3 in Hendricks Park. It will be a beautiful, warm, sunshiny afternoon — check back here for details.

The latest issue of High Desert Journal includes a couple of new poems by LLG member Charles Goodrich, along with prose and poetry by many other fine writers. Great photos and artwork, too.

High Desert Journal is dedicated to further understanding the people, places and issues of the interior West. They invite submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, memoirs, interviews, essays, book reviews, letters to the editor and visual art from residents of the region working with any theme and from anyone living outside the region creating work with high desert themes and elements.

email:  information@highdesertjournal.com

web: http://www.highdesertjournal.com/

Untitled Country Review is accepting poetry submissions. The deadline for Issue #2 is July 15. Guidelines are available atwww.untitledcountry.blogspot.com <http://www.untitledcountry.blogspot.com>.

Laura LeHew’s poems fiction forthcoming — “This Just In” in Clutching at Straws,” “The Waking Incandescence,” won an honorable mention and will be published by Kudzu, “We Don’t Need Words” has been accepted to Ghost Town, “Season to Taste” and “A Word Problem, 2” have been accepted to Perceptions, “The Scheme of Work” to Poet’s Ink Review, “When We Were Robots” and “Pancakes” in Poetry Now, “All Evidence No Proof,” “Be Still,” and “Killing Your Lover” in Post: A Journal of Thought and Feeling, “Three Shows Nightly” and “Topaz, The Grumpinator” in the first issue of The Feline Muse, “Living: This is Goodbye” and “The Absence or the Sum” in The Medulla Review, “The Well” in The Raleigh Review, “The Evolution of Bats” and one other poem tbd in Tiger’s Eye.

I was awarded a writing residency to the Montana Artists Refuge www.montanarefuge.org for the month of March ’10. And, I will be guest editing The Medulla Review www.themedullareview.com starting in July. I will be reading at the Sacramento Poetry Center’s Tiger’s Eye reading on July 12th along with Joyce Odam, Peter Ludwin, Cleo Griffith, Tom Goff and Karen Clausel– for more information: http://www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org/.

I am pleased to announce the release of a new chapbook from Uttered Chaos by Sharon Lask Munson Stillness Settles Down the Lane, May ’10. More information can be found atwww.utteredchaos.org <http://www.utteredchaos.org/>.

Oblongata Contest — check the web for details  http://www.themedullareview.com/Oblongata_Contest.html

The Medulla Review is offering a unique opportunity. During approximately the first three weeks of each month the editor-in-chief will review poetry, flash fiction, and fiction submissions for contests. First, second, and third place winners will be chosen for publication out of each category. Works will be published on the first day of every month.

First place winners will receive publication, payment based on 10% of the entry fees per category, and a link with their name on the homepage of  The Medulla Review for one year. The winning writer’s web-page containing their winning piece may also include artwork, lengthy bios, promotions of books, blogs, links to other sites, or a myriad of other things, depending on the specific wishes of the writer.

Second and third place winners will receive publication of their work and a short-bio for one year on a homepage link entitled “Oblongata Winners.”

Erik Muller has poems in the current issues of Windfall, Hubbub, and Cloudbank, with a review of Lex Runciman’s Starting from Anywhere forthcoming in the winter Cloudbank. At Poets’ Concord he led discussion of the poems of Clem Starck read by the author.