About Soundings

What are we about?

We can best get close to the heart of what Soundings is about by asking what the publication is meant to encompass and hold, much as Puget Sound informs and holds an enormous portion of the Pacific Northwest, where Pacific Lutheran University and the Rainier Writing Workshop are located.

Soundings is designed to be an ongoing celebration of the writerly wisdom and work of the Rainier Writing Workshop community. It is an online archive of articles, profiles, publications, news and notes to be used as a reference by the RWW body of writers, be they faculty, alumni, or participants.

Soundings is also a way for prospective applicants to sense the attitude and character of a low-residency MFA program that differs substantively from any other in the nation. Visitors are welcome! You are invited to leave contact information HERE.

But that doesn’t quite answer what Soundings is about. We might just as well ask what the Rainier Writing Workshop is about, and to answer that, we would be obliged to use language not usually applied to an academic program. Words like community, culture, family and friendship.

Soundings is connective tissue; a stratum of affinity meant to bridge the thousands of miles and long months that separate the writers associated with the program. It is a heap of bits and bytes and lines of code whose purpose is to create a kind of digital proximity meant to bind ss we strive in our individual but kindred pursuits of living, learning and, most of all, writing.