Clarion West

Within the limitations of the workshop, Clarion West is dedicated to improving the proportion of diverse voices in the literary world of speculative fiction as well as provide access to diverse writers from all over the world to the general public.

To quote a student: "Diversity is exploding in speculative fiction right now, and the field—and the world—is so much the richer for it. The wider the breadth of stories available to us as readers, the wider the breadth of our imaginations. The more cultures and experiences we can understand, the more people in this world we can identify with." - Margaret Killjoy, Class of 2015

We offer instruction throughout the year, and our workshops and classes vary in intensity, topic, and number of sessions. We invite prominent authors from across a broad range of speculative fiction to teach our classes and workshops. A few of our most recent instructors include Curtis Chen, Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Hand, Cadwell Turnbull, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Cory Doctorow, Nicola Griffith, Cat Rambo, Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, Kij Johnson, and Nisi Shawl.

Accessibility: Clarion West is committed to making our spaces and events more accessible to all. We are making adjustments to limit the barriers affecting people with disabilities and will continue to address needs on an ongoing basis. More information about how we do this is published on our website.

At Clarion West, we realize that the cost of classes and workshops, travel, and time away can be a barrier to attending our programs. To reduce some of these barriers, we are committed to providing scholarships covering full and partial tuition to our residential workshops; discounts to reduce the cost of online classes; free events and programs for our community; and free seats in online classes for BIPOC writers.

The Clarion West Writers Workshop was founded on the belief that writers from diverse backgrounds need an opportunity to be heard — and to experiment with new forms of storytelling. Clarion West has historically been successful in reaching women writers and LGBTQIA+ writers and many of our graduates are actively publishing in the field.

With more than 600 graduates from the Six-Week Workshop, Clarion West has played a significant role in shaping the careers of speculative fiction writers, and our work continues. As we explore our own efforts at equity and inclusion, we see an ongoing disparity in both the writers we serve and in the greater community of published writers in speculative fiction who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), who are from non-English speaking countries, and who are disabled writers. As such, we are now seeking to do better at following our mission to help new and emerging voices in speculative fiction through an examination of our workshop techniques, workshop and organizational culture, community programs, and internal processes.

As a result of feedback and community forums with our alumni, Clarion West is in the process of making lasting structural changes that promote a Six-Week Workshop culture distinctive to Clarion West’s mission of equity, empowerment, and innovation — by providing a safe space for participants to explore concepts of race, class, nationality, disability, neurodivergence, gender, and sexual orientation within and beyond the genre of speculative fiction. We hope to expand the focus of this process to every program presented by Clarion West over the next few years.

Clarion West has been providing workshops for over 30 years and has fine tuned our approach to creating the best community, staffing, and venue available to ensure success. We recruit alumni for our board of directors and often for our instructors - all who know the process and importance of our workshops.

Furthermore: At the end of 2019, the Clarion West Board of Directors launched a growth initiative with the following primary goals:
• Increase programming and opportunities for emerging writers;
• Increase organizational capacity to partner with accessible housing facilities;
• Provide sustainable income and benefits for staff.

As a result of this initiative, Clarion West has increased staff hours, provided health reimbursement benefits for qualify- ing staff, and added new team members. These actions have allowed us to provide
a greater number of programs for writers on a year-round basis. We will continue to add programs by working closely with in- structors, our community, and the board to determine the best way to make programs affordable, offer scholarship opportunities, continue to improve our accessibility overall, and keep the programs sustainable for the long term.

Although we had to postpone the Six-Week Workshop in 2020, the organization was able to add staff and pivot
to provide hundreds of online classes and programs — many of them offered for free or at a reduced cost — to more than 1,000 writers in the Puget Sound region and around the world. Our team continues to revise and manage an ongoing suite of classes and workshops online, with plans to provide in-person options again as soon as the conditions around the COVID-19 pandemic make it feasible.

The organization’s focus on sustainable programming, increased staff time and benefits, and accessibility are reflected in the significant changes you see in our budget between 2019 and 2021. The opportunity provided to Clarion West by the generous bequest of Vonda N. McIntyre has meant that we are able to manage growth through this period of significant uncertainty.

Clarion West incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1986, with workshop alumni and other interested members of the science fiction community forming its first Board of Directors. With the help of many dedicated volunteers and a core of committed professional staff, Clarion West has produced some of science fiction and fantasy's top writers and editors. Graduates have received every major form of recognition in the field, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.

In 2021, Clarion West took a deep dive into reviewing workshop methods and learning about updates being made across the field of creative writ- ing and arts programs for workshop- ping in groups. We found a consultant, Rachelle Cruz, and brought together a committee to review our practices and bring them up to date, paying special attention to the workshop environment and who felt safest in it.

The first phase of the Workshop Culture project ended in February after Cruz and the workshop staff reviewed the alumni survey and focus group results and reported these to the board and workshop culture committee.

The results indicate that participant experience and satisfaction in the Six-Week Workshop varied widely by race, as well as across other marginalized demographics. In order to address these concerns, Clarion West’s newly formed work- shop culture committee — a group of alumni and former instructors, all with writing, publishing, and teaching experience — assisted in reviewing workshop options and recommendations from Cruz and others on updating the writing workshop for today’s students. In April and May, Clarion West ran a series of experiential workshops testing several different workshop methods.

The committee met a final time in May to conclude the second phase, reflect on the experience, and offer final thoughts on the project. Members were also called upon to help update workshopping guidelines sent to the Six-Week Workshop students in 2021. In preparation for the workshop, first- week instructor and alumnus Andy Duncan drafted "Help Build! Or, Talking about Work in Progress." This document helps participants get started with a more inclusive critique format. Our team will continue to revise and update our methods over the next year and will review workshopping methods and accessibility for marginalized writers on an ongoing basis. Our number one takeaway is that we need to be better prepared, as an organization, to assist our instructors and the class in creating the workshop culture they want and to facilitate workshopping that is open to exploring non-Western stories and new voices.