Certificate Overview

The Certificate Program empowers a new generation of DIY writers and artists to thrive in the rapidly changing landscape of modern publishing. Participants choose between one of four tracks and spend two or three semesters creating and publishing their work.

 

With instruction from many of Portland’s finest writers, cartoonists and self-publishers, Certificate Program students will write, design, hand-craft and publish modest print runs of their own books, zines, comics and E-books.

Our low student-teacher ratio and individual advisor program guarantees personal attention and care. One of our main goals is to help each student develop their own independent style and craft. We strive to make our Certificate workshops student-centered, discussion-based and lively.

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 MFAs), 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.”

“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

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