SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON WRITERS CONFERENCE

With no writing conferences between Portland and Seattle, members of a writers' critique group in Centralia created the Southwest Washington Writers Conference in May 2014 to hold a conference in September. Our all-volunteer team managed to pull off the first successful conference with keynote speaker Robert Dugoni, a highly acclaimed author of suspense, intrigue and thriller fiction novels. We covered our expenses and provided all proceeds to the Lewis County Literary Council. Proceeds from following annual conferences benefitted the Lewis County Historical Museum, the Veterans Memorial Museum, and the Centralia Fox Theater. Since 2018, the Centralia College Foundation has been the recipient of all proceeds, providing scholarships to writers pursuing an education in Southwest Washington.

While eager to inspire writers who attend our conference, the Southwest Washington Writers Conference also strives to benefit the community by providing proceeds to local nonprofits. Our early September conference has expanded from one day to two days, with a Friday master class followed by the conference on Saturday. We select keynote speakers who are established fiction and nonfiction writers who have succeeded in the publishing industry so that our conference attendees learn from and build on the success of others in the field. While attending our conference, conferees can select from among more than a dozen workshops tailored to address specific skills such as strong writing, grammar, character development, marketing, social media, poetry, historical fiction, memoir, and newspaper writing. In addition, and importantly, conference attendees have the opportunity to learn from our keynote speakers and workshop presenters and enjoy other enriching conference opportunities all within a reasonable distance from their homes.

Each year, our volunteers review evaluation data provided by our attendees to learn how to serve our community better and provide more of what our conference attendees need and desire. For example, conference attendees recently have voiced an eagerness to meet with agents and editors in order to move their writing careers forward. While we'd love to connect writers with agents and acquisition editors, the conference would need to move to a new level to achieve that goal. We want to enable writers in our community to learn more about their craft, to grow as authors as well as human beings, to be open-minded about diverse views and styles as well as trusted and established methods of authorship so that they can become successful, published authors. In short, we want to empower writers to achieve more and to be the authors they dream of becoming.