Writer Hallie Ephron is set to speak this weekend at the Southwest Washington Writers Conference.
The sixth annual Southwest Washington Writers Conference is scheduled to take place on Sept. 7 at Centralia College and will feature a keynote speech by New York Times bestselling author Hallie Ephron.
Registration before the day of the conference is $90 and can be completed at southwestwashingtonwriters.com. Admittance will cost $100 at the door and includes a light breakfast and lunch items during the event.
This year marks the second in which the Lewis County Writers Guild has been in charge of the conference. A total of 16 workshops covering subjects ranging from genre-specific writing tips to the business of writing will take place over four sections beginning at 12:30 p.m.
Pat Thompson, president of the Lewis County Writer’s Guild, said the organization became a nonprofit last year in order to partner with the Centralia College Foundation.
“We’ve created a scholarship and we can give our profits to the scholarship fund,” Thompson said. “Everything we’re doing is for the community. Last year, we gave the Centralia College Foundation $2,000, which was awarded to a student from Toledo High School who wants to stay in the area and teach high school.”
Ephron, whose most popular titles include “Writing and Selling your Mystery Novel” and “You’ll Never Know, Dear” previously wrote a regular column for the Boston Globe. The latter title was named to the Top 10 Mystery and Suspense Audiobooks of 2017 list published by Audiofile.
She will be teaching a sold-out master class Friday evening and will participate as a panelist during the conference. Thompson said that having Ephron headline the event will help what is one of the smaller writing conferences in the Pacific Northwest gain some notoriety.
“It was actually a wonderful case of happenstance,” Thompson said. “One of our members had gone to the Willamette Writers Conference a couple of years ago, where they took Ephron’s class. They sent her an email asking if she’d be interested in the Southwest Washington Writer’s Conference. Ours is only a one-day conference, but we’re halfway between Portland and Seattle, which is a great location we hope to draw more people to.”
For more information on the conference, visit facebook.com/southwestwashingtonwritersconference or call 310-941-6660.
For more information about Ephron, go to http://hallieephron.com/home.
