The IPRC’s Certificate Program
“It’s possible that the IPRC is the future of both writing and publishing—a place committed to the study of prose and poetry, but also the craft of layout, printing, and binding as well. To see the books and zines produced at the IPRC on a daily basis is to witness that the culture of print—i.e. the culture of thought itself—might not be dying after all. Hell, at the IPRC it’s even thriving.”
–Jon Raymond, Oregon Book Award-winning author of Livability
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 college credit option through the University of Oregon, please click either of the following links: UNDERGRADUATE CREDIT OPTIONS (AAA408), or GRADUATE CREDIT OPTIONS (AAA508). Only students officially accepted into the IPRC’s Certificate Program can choose these options.
With instruction from many of Portland’s finest writers, cartoonists and self-publishers, Certificate Program students will design, hand-craft and publish modest print runs of their own books, zines, comics and E-books; many will 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, Arthur Bradford, Jon Raymond, Moe Bowstern, Lidia Yuknavitch 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, Nicole J Georges, John Isaacson, Lisa Mangum, Dunja Jankovic, Shawn Granton, Tim Goodyear, Greig Means, Craig Thompson and more.
2012/2013 CURRICULUM OVERVIEW:
Fiction/Nonfiction Track*
Fall Semester 2012:
1) Core Creative Writing Workshop with instructor/IPRC Director Justin Hocking and/or IPRC Program Coordinator A.M. O’Malley. Will meet once a week for three hours.
a) Intro intensive weekend with Justin Hocking, A.M. O’Malley, and Kevin Sampsell.
b) Guest lectures by Kevin Sampsell, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jon Raymond, Arthur Bradford, and more.
Spring Semester 2013:
1) Intensive workshop in Production, Design, and Book Arts facilitated by Michael D’Allesandro. Will meet once a week for three 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) Intro + Advanced letterpress workshops
2) Screenprinting workshop (taught at Em Space Book Arts Center)
3) Beginning and Advanced InDesign instruction
4) Perfect-binding machine workshop
5) E-Book creation and publication with Natalie Guidry
6) Webdesign + social media instruction
*Note: This schedule is subject to change
Poetry Track*
Fall Semester 2012:
1) Core Poetry Workshop and book arts/letterpress intensives with instructors B.T. Shaw and Michael D’Allesandro. Will meet once a week for three hours.
a) Guest lectures with Matthew Dickman, Emily Kendal Frey, Kaia Sand and others.
Spring Semester 2013:
1) Intensive workshop in self-publishing, bookbinding and book arts with B.T. Shaw and Michael D’Allesandro. Will meet once a week for three hours; Spring Semester also includes poetry manuscript workshops with B.T. Shaw. 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) Intro + Advanced letterpress workshops
2) Broadside workshop
3) Beginning and Advanced InDesign instruction
4) E-Book design and publication with Natalie Guidry
5) Webdesign + social media instruction
6) Perfect-binding machine workshop
*Note: This schedule is subject to change
Comics/Graphic Novels Track*
Fall Semester 2012 (Skills and Peer Workshop Semester):
1) Comics Storytelling Workshop with Jesse Reklaw. Will meet once a week for three 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 three hours.
a) Guest lectures with Craig Thompson and others.
Spring Semester 2013 (Comics Development Semester):
1) World Comics Workshop with Lisa Mangum and Dunja Jankovic
-OR-
2) Elements of Graphic Narrative Workshop with Annie Murphy
Summer 2013 Publishing and Production Semester (comics track only):
1) Comics Production and Publishing Workshop with Nicole Georges and others. After choosing up to twelve elective module workshops, 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 electives may 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 (Guest Lecturer) 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 (Guest Lecturer) 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?”
Jon Raymond (Guest Lecturer) 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.
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 (Guest Lecturer) 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 (Guest Lecturer) 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 (Guest Lecturer) 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.
Craig Thompson (Guest Lecturer) 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.
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.
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;” and member of Balkan comics collective Komikaze. She 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 Serbia and working on her own comic The Hunting Years.
DATES AND TIMES:
The Certificate Program will officially begin mid September, 2012. The Fall Semester runs from mid-September through mid-December. The Spring Semester runs mid-January through mid-May 2013. The Summer Semester (Comics only) runs late-May through mid-July 2013.
The Certificate Program is a part time course of study designed to accommodate students with busy schedules. Workshops generally meet once a week from 6-9pm or 7-10pm.
PROGRAM COSTS:
The cost for the 2012/2013 program is $650 per semester. Tuition includes all workshops and lectures, an advisor, and a two-year membership to the IPRC.
APPLICATION/DEADLINE:
The Certificate Program application process is simple. To begin the process, please print out the PDF application form below:
» Download the IPRC Certificate Application (PDF)
Please complete both sides of the form, including the short essay question. We also require that you include a short work sample with your application.
Completed applications forms and work samples should be sent to:
IPRC
Attn: Certificate Program
917 SW Oak #218
Portland, OR 97205
The application post-marked deadline for the 2012/2013 Certificate Program is June 30, 2012. However, early application is encouraged.
CONTACT/QUESTIONS:
If you have any questions about the program, feel free to contact Justin Hocking at justin@iprc.org, or by calling 503.827.0249.
