Ergenbright, Erin

Project: Our Town
A guidebook can show you a city's highlights, but the people who live in that city reveal stories that are entirely different (and much more interesting). We'll use writing exercises and mini-lessons on character, point of view, detail, voice and sentence fluency to develop stories about students' very specific place in the world: The street they grew up on. These stories show and tell who we are and where we're from, and also the many events and characters specific to this important place. We will also create maps, and/or collages to accompany our stories, which will be compiled for a class anthology.

Project: Fairy Tales and What Happens the Morning AFTER
Most fairy tale characters are cardboard; we don't really know who they are, or what they would do if they weren't stuck in a particular story. Through writing exercises, brainstorming, collage, and rewrites, we'll learn about the elements of fiction--character, dialogue, setting, and plot--while creating a real and meaningful character from a prescribed fable.


Erin Ergenbright is the author of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook (HarperCollins) with Thisbe Nissen, and a co-founder of the Loggernaut Reading Series. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Believer Magazine, Tin House, The Oregonian, The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling it all Together in Your Thirties (JP Tarcher/Penguin), Alone in the Kitchen With An Eggplant: Confessions of Dining Alone and Cooking For One (Riverhead), Colorado Review, Oklahoma Review, Indiana Review, Dislocate, Portland Monthly, Bellingham Review, Cadillac Cixatrix and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and has taught fiction, nonfiction and composition at Marylhurst University, Clark College, and the University of Iowa, as well as in over two dozen elementary, middle, and high schools in the Portland area. She is also a facilitator with Write Around Portland.