Words and Wine 2025

Words and Wine Workshop

June 6th - June 8th, 2025

Early Bird Exclusive Offer!

Register for the Words and Wine Workshop prior to May 1, 2025 and receive an exclusive copy of The Entire Sky, a novel by Joe Wilkins and a bottle of Linfield University wine.
*while supplies last

Linfield University is proud to present Words and Wine, a gathering for writers of all experience levels set in the heart of Oregon wine country. The weekend will feature four workshop sessions conducted by featured guest faculty; a writing process and publishing panel; faculty and attendee readings; and an opening celebration and wine tasting featuring Linfield’s Director of Wine Studies, Maria Ponzi.

Hosted on the beautiful, historic campus of Linfield University, "The Words and Wine Weekend" kicks off on Friday, June 6th at 6:30 PM with Maria Ponzi, author of Pinot Girl and the Director of the Center for Wine Education who will present a brief background on the Willamette Valley as a renowned wine region. A wine reception and hors d'oeuvres will also be offered. A reading by workshop faculty will conclude the opening evening. Third Street Books of downtown McMinnville will be on hand for book sales.

The following two days will be filled with generative, supportive, challenging workshops taught by our esteemed 2025 faculty: Megan Kruse, Ellen Waterston, and Joe Wilkins. Faculty will also be available for informal office hours, and Megan, Ellen and Joe will host a panel on the writing process and publishing to close the Words and Wine gathering on Sunday. Saturday will feature a wine reception and open mic readings by conference attendees!

Don’t miss this exciting and unique opportunity to gather with other writers and develop your craft and writing process. Workshops hosted by guest faculty might include:

What We Really Mean to Say: Utilizing Poetic Techniques in Prose
Layers of Landscape: Harnessing the Power of Place
Our First Gods: Writing Our Parents
The Hardest Parts: Writing Beginnings and Endings

Workshop Faculty

Joe Wilkins
Professor & Author

Meet Joe

Joe Wilkins
Professor of English and Environmental Studies. Director of creative writing, Department Chair for Linfield University

Learn more about Joe Wilkins Here

Joe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana and now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. He is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist; a finalist for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, Fall Back Down When I Die won the High Plains Book Award. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of a GLCA New Writers Award, and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His latest novel, The Entire Sky, tells the intertwining stories of a young runaway who bears a striking resemblance to Kurt Cobain, a grieving sheep rancher, and a woman in the middle of her life not knowing which way to go. You can find him online at https://joewilkins.org/ and https://joewilkinswriter.substack.com/.

Ellen Waterston
Oregon Poet Laureate

Megan Kruse
Author

Meet Ellen

Ellen Waterston
Named Oregon Poet Laureate in August, 2024

Learn more about Ellen Waterston Here

Ellen Waterston was named Oregon Poet Laureate in August 2024 for a two-year term. Also in 2024, Ellen received the Stewart H. Holbrook Award and the Soapstone Bread and Roses Award.
Ellen’s next book, titled We Could Die Doing This, a collection of essays, will be released late 2024.
Released May 2020, Ellen Waterston’s third and latest nonfiction title, Walking the High Desert, Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail, University of Washington Press, is receiving strong praise:
“There is no better guide to Oregon's high desert than Ellen Waterston. Her sense of place, her lyrical love of this sometimes hard to love place, her balanced yet passionate dissection of the issues roiling the big land of junipers and open sky is a wonderful match for her subject. While the West is full of poets who love the land, few of them are as intellectually nimble as Waterston.”
-Timothy Egan, author of A Pilgrimage to Eternity and columnist for The New York Times
Ellen is also the author of a collection of essays, Where the Crooked River Rises, Oregon State University Press; a memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group; and four poetry titles: Hotel Domilocos, Moonglade Press, Between Desert Seasons, Wordcraft of Oregon and I Am Madagascar, Ice River Press. Her fourth poetry title and verse novel, Vía Láctea, A Woman of a Certain Age Walks the Camino, published by Atelier 6000, she subsequently converted to a libretto. It premiered as a full-length opera and is slated for a second staging.
Her award-winning essays and poems have been featured in many journals and anthologies. Poetry awards include the WILLA Award in Poetry for two of her collections and the Obsidian Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants and residencies. She was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Oregon State University Cascades for her accomplishments as an author and poet and her promotion of the literary arts.
As a literary arts advocate, she is the founder of the Writing Ranch which offers workshops and retreats for established and emerging writers. She was the founder and, for over a decade, the executive director of The Nature of Words, a literary arts nonprofit featuring an annual literary festival in Bend, Oregon and creative writing workshops in regional schools, social welfare programs, and at its literary arts center’s Storefront Project. She subsequently founded the Waterston Desert Writing Prize which, in 2020, was adopted by the High Desert Museum. This Prize annually recognizes a nonfiction book proposal that examines the role of deserts in the human narrative. Waterston is on the faculty of OSU Cascades MFA Low Residency program.

Meet Megan

Megan Kruse is the author of Call Me Home (Hawthorne Books, 2015). Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and she has received recent residency support from Wildacres Retreat, PLAYA, and the Carolyn Moore Writers House. She was one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for 2015 and the recipient of a 2016 Pacific Northwest Book Award. She teaches fiction for the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University and Gotham Writers Workshop. She currently lives in Olympia.

Maria Ponzi
Director of Linfield Center for Wine Education

Meet Maria

Anna Maria Ponzi has dedicated her life to Oregon wine. At the age of four, she helped plant one of the earliest vineyards as her pioneering parents established one of the first wineries in the Willamette Valley. She’s had the rare opportunity of working in every aspect of the wine business and has served the industry in myriad ways, most importantly, as an ambassador for Oregon wine both nationally and internationally.

In her former role as owner and CEO of Ponzi Vineyards, she grew her family wine business from a garage operation into a globally recognized wine brand. Among other industry benchmarks, she envisioned and set in motion the transformation of Oregon wine country into a world class visitor destination. In 1999, she established the valley’s first regional wine bar and, in 2013, opened the valley’s first seated wine tasting experience. In 2020, she published her memoir Pinot Girl, and the following year successfully negotiated the sale of the winery to the esteemed French producer, Bollinger of Champagne.

She continues to support the state’s wine and tourism industry through ongoing service for multiple organizations including the Oregon Wine Board, IPNC and her wine consulting and speaking firm, amponzi & company. Her keynote, “The Four-Ounce Pour” presents a framework to guide our lives towards greater meaning and fulfillment. She is the current Director of the Center for Wine Education at Linfield University and is the co-founder of Anthony’s Circle, a non-profit that seeks to empower foster youth through the public school system to achieve an 85% graduation rate.

Anna Maria is married and the mother of two adult children and two big dogs. She and her husband live on their 20-acre vineyard, issimo, in the beautiful North Willamette Valley.

Workshop Agenda

Friday, June 6th

4:00pm

6:30pm

Registration

Opening Reception
Faculty readings and wine lesson

Saturday, June 7th

8:00am

9:30am

11:30am

1:00pm

3:00pm

5:00pm

Breakfast

Workshop Welcome & Writing Session #1

Lunch

Writing Session #2

Writing Session #3

Wine Reception with Open Mic Readings

Sunday, June 8th

8:00am

9:15am

10:45am

12:00pm

Breakfast

Writing Session #4

Faculty Panel Discussion with Q&A

Workshop Closing

Linfield University | 900 SE Baker St, McMinnville, OR 97128