Northwest Writing Institute

Since its inception in 1986 the Northwest Writing Institute (NWI) has provided a home to diverse writing initiatives from all three schools at Lewis & Clark. Beginning with its first venture, the Oregon Writing Project, which strives to improve writing instruction in Oregon schools through teacher seminars, the institute has championed programs that pursue writing across cultures and economic strata.

For nearly 30 years, the institute’s programs have reached far beyond Lewis & Clark. In 1987, NWI helped launch the Fishtrap Writers Gathering, a weeklong series of workshops, readings, and discussions held at Wallowa Lake each summer. In 1988, NWI established the Oregon Folk Arts Program, a hub for statewide folklife activities now based at the University of Oregon.

Kim Stafford, director of the Northwest Writing Institute, says NWI “tries to be ambidextrous by combining academic and personal writing,” and that, though its programs have changed through the life of the institute, they have shared a common philosophy.

“NWI has been a kind of incubator for a broad range of courses and projects founded on what can be learned, deepened, and shared by writing,” Stafford says. “What has remained central to our work is the practice of inquiry-based writing in service to cultural understanding. This combination of personal and cultural interests has brought the power of personal story to an investigation of regional, ethnic, and world cultures.”

Stafford, a respected figure in Northwest literary circles who has taught writing at Lewis & Clark since 1979, has published many collections of essays and poems, and edited a number of collections of work by his father, William Stafford. (The NWI also administered the William Stafford Center until the William Stafford archives were donated to Watzek Library by the Stafford family in 2008, and has helped to convene several symposia on the work of the late poet.)

“The Northwest Writing Institute originally grew out of a single, college-wide question: What is this college doing with the practice of writing?” Stafford says. The question led to the convening of a committee of staff from the College of Arts and Science’s English, history, and rhetoric and media studies departments, writing center, and Watzek Library; the Lewis & Clark Law School’s legal writing program; and the Graduate School of Education and Counseling’s teacher education program. The institute’s initial work, which emerged from those conversations, was a series of faculty writing workshops and support of Basic Inquiry, the College of Arts and Science’s first-year course at the time.

Today, the Northwest Writing Institute is housed at the Graduate School of Education and Counseling, and focuses on providing writing classes for enrolled graduate students and workshops for writers from the Portland community, while continuing to support writing programs at the college’s other schools. Current community offerings include courses on imaginative writing, digital storytelling, and writing about diverse cultural stories.

“When NWI began in the 1980s, there was an impetus across campus toward writing to learn and writing across the curriculum,” Stafford says. “The legacy of the Northwest Writing Institute has been to sustain that broad aspiration that writing is not an esoteric craft practiced by the few, but a universal opportunity for all learners.”