Looking for writers in all the wrong places? Maybe you need The Write Place.
Join us at The Write Place each week, online. Discuss goal setting and productivity while encouraging, supporting, and connecting with other writers. We will share our rejections, sales, and other market news so that we can inspire and learn from each other.
How to join us
Please sign up for our email newsletter here! We will send you details for logging in.
About Our Online Meetings
Willamette Writers meetings are open to all writers, 18 and up. Young writers are encouraged to join our Young Willamette Writers meetings. Writers are welcome to make a donation to help support the cost of the meeting. This meeting is run by volunteers.
See you at the Write Place!
Your Write Place Hosts
Thank you to our amazing volunteers who run the Write Place! Our Coordinator is Roni Stinger, working with: Diana Blackstone-Helt, Rick East, Katherine Quevedo and Rich Wingerter. We are lucky to have the support of these talented professionals.
Diana Blackstone-Helt
Diana has been a voracious reader since age nine after a librarian handed her the first book in a fantasy series. She grew up in the country surrounded by fields and trees and credits the resulting hay fever for her interest in writing stories. Unable to play outside without misery from the age of ten, she spent half of every summer vacation inside reading and writing stories until the pollen count dwindled.
Diana served nearly 30 years as a high school English teacher and academic support coordinator. She originally chose to teach older students because she thought they would be able to manage their own bodily fluids better than little kids would. She discovered she was mostly right about that, and as a bonus, she found teenagers a blast to spend her days with. She left teaching in 2021 and now pulls from her experience with teenagers to write middle grade and YA fiction.
Diana’s first middle grade novel, When Sparrows Fall, was originally published under the name Diana Blackstone in 2015 by Leap Books, and won the Cascade Award for Published Middle Grade/YA Fiction. She lives in Salem, with her husband Alan and her rescue pets, Quincy the dog and Casper the cat. Her happy place is in a dragon boat on the Willamette River. Her two grown sons and a daughter-in-law live nearby and come home for dinner often. Dianablackstone.com.
Katherine Quevedo
Katherine Quevedo was born and raised near Portland, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. Her short stories and poetry have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award and have appeared in Asimov’s, Nightmare Magazine, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere.
Her debut mini-chapbook, The Inca Weaver’s Tales, is available from Sword & Kettle Press. Find her at Katherinequevedo.com.
Rich Wingerter
Rich Wingerter is a retired business analyst and new writer of science fiction and speculative fiction. He lives with his partner, Kathryn, in Forest Grove, OR.
Rich first became interested in science fiction in eighth grade when he discovered many classical science fiction books in the school library. Now, he has a growing collection of short stories and screenplays that range from the hard science fiction Murder in Strawberry to the mythology of Platée the Plain. He just completed a collection of short and medium speculative fiction stories, Fantastical.
Rich graduated from Mount Union College (now University of Mount Union) in Alliance, OH, with an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts. He worked for minicomputer maker Data General and Silicon Valley startup Clarify, where he consulted with international consulting firms and with both small and large organizations, as well as other startups.
For Rich, a typical story starts with “What would it be like if…”. And then, the journey begins.