Written by Erin Wilcox | 18 September 2009

Last week, I went to Portland. I experienced the majesty of Powell's Books and the serenity of the Japanese Gardens, saw Mount Hood and even Mount Saint Helens in the east. In all, it was beautiful--green, lush, everything my native California heart yearns for after a Tucson summer.

One of the greatest parts of my trip was getting a tour of the Writers' Dojo, an enterprise that Tucson writers might be interested to know about. The dojo is a physical space on the one hand, a two-story building nestled among cherry trees and black-eyed Suzies. I had to remove my shoes to enter. The bamboo floor was cool under under my feet. Potted plants and red-gold rugs decorated the ground floor, and on the wall hung a framed quote calligraphed on rice paper: "the tears i shed yesterday have become rain."

Members of the dojo are invited to lounge on canvas and leather couches or sit at sturdy desks to read and write. Upstairs, writers enjoy total concentration in the quiet area. As I toured the grounds, complete with a martial arts center next door, I realized that I could feel quite at home in this space so carefully designed to enrich creative life.

Portland writers are not the only lucky ones because Writers' Dojo is also an online space, intended, like its physical counterpart, to provide solace and community. Writersdojo.org  offers interesting blogs covering topics from nourishing the creative process to the exploring the deep mythical significance of vampires. The site holds interviews, both transcribed and recorded live, with prominent writers such as Steve Almond, Chelsea Cain, and Chuck Palahniuk. It also displays creative work, and, good news, the Writers' Dojo online literary magazine is open for submissions.

Co-founder Jeffrey Selin wants to promote community at many levels. While the dojo's physical space is rooted in a local context, the literary magazine reaches out to a wider audience and draws from a broader artistic pool. If you're interested in following the site and posting comments regularly, you can sign up for a free account. If you have any fiction, poetry, nonfiction, artwork, or photography that is looking for a home, you might consider sending it their way.