The IPRC’s New Certificate Program
Join us for the IPRC’s next creative odyssey: a year-long certificate program in Independent Publishing. Participants choose between one of three tracks– 1) Fiction/Nonfiction, 2) Poetry, or 3) Comics/Graphic Novels–and spend between two and three semesters creating and publishing their work.
We’re pleased to announce that an academic credit option is available through a partnership with the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon. This is 3 credits per quarter term, AAA 408 or AAA 508. To explore the credit option through the University of Oregon, please click here. Only students officially accepted into the IPRC’s Certificate Program can choose this option.
With instruction from many of Portland’s finest writers, cartoonists and self-publishers, students in each Certificate track will design, hand-craft and publish modest print runs of their own books and comics, and may go on to start their own small presses. Our low student-teacher ratio and individual advisor program guarantees personal attention and care. And one of our main goals is to help each student develop their own independent style and craft. To achieve this, we strive to make our Certificate workshops student-centered, discussion-based and lively. The IPRC is a dynamic workspace, so we also strive to facilitate experiential, hands-on learning, practical skills and artistic discipline.
Many writing and cartooning programs cost roughly the price of a new BMW. Our program, on the other hand, costs about as much as a nice new bike. And as a program we are much like a bicycle: not flashy, but nimble. Human powered. Something old that is also new. The future.
Furthermore, while we are all for traditional undergraduate and MFA programs (many of our instructors have MFA’s), we’re critical of the skewed exchange that sometimes takes place between students and large educational institutions, especially when it comes to writing and the arts. At the same time that many students graduate with large debt loads, they’re also denied further access to the very institutions that created that debt. On the other hand, tuition in our Certificate Program is also an investment in the IPRC’s publishing resources and vibrant community–which are forever available to all our students, and that will continue to develop and grow with each “investment.”
The IPRC’s Certificate Program features generative workshops with the following instructors, guest lecturers, and advisors:
Fiction/Nonfiction Track: Justin Hocking, A.M. O’Malley, Michael D’Allesandro, Kevin Sampsell, Alex Wrekk, Cheryl Strayed, Arthur Bradford, Jon Raymond, Moe Bowstern, Mark Searcy and more.
Poetry Track: B.T. Shaw, Michael D’Allesandro, Matthew Dickman, Emily Kendal Frey, Kaia Sand and more.
Comics/Graphic Novel Track: Jesse Reklaw, Dylan Williams,
Annie Murphy, Craig Thompson, Nicole J. Georges, John Isaacson, Shawn Granton, Lisa Mangum, Greig Means, T. Edward Bak and more.
2010/2011 CURRICULUM OVERVIEW:
Fiction/Nonfiction Track*
Fall Semester 2010:
1) Core Creative Writing Workshop with instructor/IPRC Director Justin Hocking. Will meet once a week for 2-3 hours.
a) Intro intensive weekend with Justin Hocking, Cheryl Strayed and Kevin Sampsell.
b) Guest lectures by Kevin Sampsell, Cheryl Strayed, Jon Raymond, Arthur Bradford, Alex Wrekk and more.
Spring Semester 2011:
1) Intensive workshop in Production, Design, and Book Arts facilitated by Michael D’Allesandro. Will meet once a week for 2-3 hours. Final project will be a book or chapbook, self-published and perfect-bound at the IPRC.
Spring Semester for Fiction/Nonfiction will also include:
1) Five hour letterpress workshop
2) Screenprinting workshop (taught at Em Space Book Arts Center)
3) Beginning and Advanced InDesign instruction
4) Perfect-binding machine workshop
5) Webdesign + social media instruction
*Note: This schedule is subject to change
Poetry Track*
Fall Semester 2010:
1) Core Poetry Workshop with instructor B.T. Shaw. Will meet once a week for 2-3 hours.
a) Guest lectures with Matthew Dickman, Emily Kendal Frey, Kaia Sand and others.
Spring Semester 2011:
1) Intensive workshop in self-publishing, bookbinding and book arts with B.T. Shaw and Michael D’Allesandro. Will meet once a week for 2-3 hours. Final product will be a chapbook collection of poetry, self-published and perfect-bound at the IPRC.
Spring Semester for Poetry will also include:
1) Five hour letterpress workshop
2) Screenprinting workshop (taught at Em Space Book Arts Center)
3) Beginning and Advanced InDesign instruction
4) Perfect-binding machine workshop
*Note: This schedule is subject to change
Comics/Graphic Novels Track*
Fall Semester 2010 (Skills and Peer Workshop Semester):
1) Comics Storytelling Workshop with Jesse Reklaw. Will meet once a week for 2-3 hours.
a) Guest lectures with Craig Thompson and others.
-OR-
2) Cartoon/Graphic Novel Workshop Seminar with John Isaacson and Nicole J. Georges. Will meet once a week for 2-3 hours.
Spring Semester 2011 (Comics Development Semester):
1) World Comics Workshop with Dylan Williams and Lisa Mangum
-OR-
2) Elements of Graphic Narrative Workshop with Annie Murphy
Summer 2011 Publishing and Production Semester (comics track only):
1) Comics Production and Publishing Workshop with Dylan Williams and Shawn Granton. Students will learn production and self-publishing techniques, important pre-press layout skills, and much more. Each participant will produce a modest print run of their own comic.
Summer Comics Semester will also include:
1) Five hour letterpress workshop
2) Screenprinting Workshop taught at Em Space by John Isaacson
3) Tour of local printing companies, such as Brown Printing
4) Perfect-binding machine Workshop with B.T. Livermore
5) Beginning and advanced Indesign instruction
*Note: this schedule is subject to change
Instructor and Guest Lecturer Bios
Fiction/Nonfiction Track:
Justin Hocking was hired as the IPRC’s Executive Director in the fall of 2006. He has an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University, where he also taught as an instructor of writing and literature. Before coming to the IPRC, he worked in the New York City publishing industry. He is the author of numerous zines and thirteen books, including Life and Limb (Soft Skull Press 2004) and Beach 90th (Swift Season Press 2009). His writing has also appeared in Thrasher, Open City, the Portland Noir Anthology, Concrete Wave, Travel Oregon, The Normal School, Foulweather and others. He is currently at work on a memoir about surfing in New York City.
A.M. O’Malley is the Program Coordinator at the IPRC. She has been self-publishing for over 15 years and has a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. A.M. teaches media literacy, creative writing, and zines to students aged 8-80 as part of the IPRC’s Outreach program. She recently self-published an anthology of her zines entitled Take a Picture it Lasts Longer.
Kevin Sampsell is a writer, editor, and self-publisher. He runs the independent publishing company Future Tense Books, and oversees the small press section at Powell’s Books. His memoir A Common Pornography was published by Harper Collins in 2010.
Arthur Bradford is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Dogwalker. He has won an O. Henry Award and has had stories published in McSweeney’s, Esquire, Zoetrope and Bomb. Since 2006 he has served as the director for Camp Jabberwocky, the longest running sleepover camp for adults with disabilities. He was also the director of the MTV series “How’s Your News?”
Alex Wrekk has published her zine, Brainscan, since 1997 as well as many other independent publishing projects along the way. She runs Small World Buttons and enjoys creative re-use and a good beer. She is the author of Stolen Sharpie Revolution, now in its second edition.
Cheryl Strayed Cheryl Strayed is the author of the novel Torch, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006 and the memoir, Wild, forthcoming from Knopf in 2011. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Sun, Allure, Brain, Child and other places and have twice been included in The Best American Essays.
Jon Raymond is the author of the novel The Half Life and the short story collection Livability, which won the Oregon Book Award in 2009. He also co-wrote the screenplays for the acclaimed films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.
Before relocating to Portland, Mark Searcy co-owned and operated Art Prostitute, the award winning, internationally distributed art and design publication, in addition to teaching design at the University of North Texas and Texas A&M-Commerce. Mark is also the former Art Director of the Portland Mercury.
Poetry Track:
Born and raised near her great-grandparents’ homestead in Central Ohio, B.T. Shaw lives in Portland, where she writes and teaches. Her first collection, This Dirty Little Heart, won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize from Eastern Washington University Press, and her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as Field, Agni, Climbing, and Tin House. Students in her Chapbook class at Portland State University have placed their work for sale at local bookstores, including Powell’s and Reading Frenzy. She’s edited the Poetry column in The Oregonian for a dozen years.
Michael D’Alessandro is a writer, small press publisher and editor. He edits the semiannual literary journal swap/concessions, and is the founder of bedouin books, which publishes emerging writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry with a focus on hand bound books in letterpressed covers. He has been published in various journals and is the author of two books of poetry. He teaches workshops in letterpress printing at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, and poetry at Em-Space Book Arts Center, also in Portland. In 2008 he graduated from Naropa University with an MFA in creative writing. He lives in NW Portland.
Matthew Dickman is the author of two chapbooks, Amigos and Something about a Black Scarf. His first book, All-American Poem, was winner of the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, published by American Poetry Review and distributed by Copper Canyon Press He was also winner of the 2009 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for that book, and the inaugural May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has appeared in Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, AGNI Online, The Missouri Review and The New Yorker.
Kaia Sand is the author of a poetry collection, interval (Edge Books 2004), a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year, and co-author with Jules Boykoff ofLandscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008), and she has created several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv. Her poems lotto and tiny arctic ice comprise the text of two books in Jim Dine’s Hot Dreams series (52 Books 2008). She lives in Portland, Oregon, with Jules Boykoff and their daughter, Jessica.
Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Airport (Blue Hour Press 2009) and, collaboratively with Zachary Schomburg, Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010). She teaches at Portland Community College.
Comics/Graphic Novel Track:
Jesse Reklaw has been drawing and publishing the weekly comic Slow Wave for over ten years and has been nominated twice for the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic. He also authored the zine Applicant, the autobiographic Ten Thousand Things to Do, and the book The Night of Your Life (Dark Horse Comics). He has taught comics courses at Portland Community College, the IPRC, and elsewhere.
Dylan Williams started out self-publishing comics and zines in the 1980s and has been doing so ever since. He created the series Horse, Crime Clinic and the comic strip, Hey Granpa. He was also a founding member of the Puppy Toss comic collective in Berkeley, California. His life work is a comic book series called Reporter. He runs the proudly independent publishing and distribution company Sparkplug Comics in Portland, Oregon.
Craig Thompson is the author of Goodbye Chunky Rice and Blankets, and is currently finishing the much-anticipated Habibi. He has received the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards for Best Graphic Novel and Best Cartoonist.
Nicole J. Georges is a zinester, illustrator, and pet portrait artist. Nicole has been publishing her own zines and autobiographical comics for over fourteen years, the most recent of which, Invincible Summer, has been collected into an anthology and released as two volumes (from Tugboat Press and Microcosm Publishing). She is currently at work on a graphic novel.
T. Edward Bak is author of Service Industry and has appeared in multiple comics anthologies including Drawn & Quarterly Showcase. In 2007, Todd was awarded the Fellowship at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont.
Annie Murphy is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist born and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her comic I Still Live: Biography of a Spiritualist won a Xeric Grant in 2009. Last year her comics and illustrations appeared in Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, When Language Runs Dry: A Zine for People with Chronic Pain and Their Allies, and the Sundays 3 anthology. She is a co-creator of The Collective Tarot released this Spring from Eberhardt Press, and is in the process of editing a queer comics anthology.
Shawn Granton has been volunteering at the IPRC since 2001. He has been self-publishing for a decade, primarily his own comic, Ten Foot Rule. Shawn also edits the Zinester’s Guide to Portland and leads bicycle and walking tours under the auspices of the Urban Adventure League.
Lisa Mangum is co-editor of the anthology GAZETA: Comics from Bangkok to Belgrade; historian and scholar of East European comics; contributing author of ”Stripovi: Contemporary Comics in Croatia in Serbia;” member of Balkan comics collective Komikaze; studied animation at Evergreen and CalArts and International Studies at the University of Washington. She’s currently writing a graduate thesis on underground comix in Serbi and working on her own comic The Hunting Years.
Program Costs
The cost for the 2010/2011 program is $625 per semester. Tuition includes all workshops and lectures, an advisor/internship, a two-year membership to the IPRC, and a one-year membership to the new Em Space Book Arts center, plus after-hours access to the IPRC.
» Download the IPRC Certificate Application (PDF)
Completed application forms and work samples should be sent to:
IPRC
Attn: Certificate Program
917 SW Oak #218
Portland, OR 97205
The application deadline for the Poetry track and the Fiction/Nonfiction track was June 30th, 2010; we are no longer accepting applications in these tracks. However, the application deadline for the Comics Program has been extended to August 6th.
If you have any questions about the program, feel free to contact Justin Hocking at justin@iprc.org or call 503.827.0249.
