Welcome to Centrum.

A music and arts community.

If you're passionate about art and creativity, you're going to love this place.

Week long workshops at Centrum come in all flavors.

Just in the next month or so, we've got a Brazilian Choro class, a ukulele festival, Red Hot Strings, which is a vintage style of jazz, and even a youth workshop with Blue Heron Middle School.

Let's go talk to some people who know more about it.

Tell me about the impact of a week during these workshops on, yourself and other participants.

What - what's that like?

It's absolutely incredible to have that amount of time.

I think part of it is you are giving yourself that time as an artist.

And so it's a way to honor your own work, and you're bringing that energy of honor into the into the conference.

And you can feel it.

It's palpable.

And it's this brief lapse of time where it's all about your work and the art and the craft and everyone else is engaged in that.

And with Fort Worden being what it was, there's so many nooks and crannies and places to go do deep work.

And you can go into solitude, and then you can take a walk and meet another writer at a picnic table or around a tidepool or, you know, wherever people are hanging out and know they are as immersed in it as you are.

And there's just this feeling of belonging.

You walk on the campus and you can tell yourself, I belong.

I'm a writer.

I'm an artist.

I am showing up for my work.

And it's it's a very beautiful, beautiful thing to have happen.

And as an instructor, for me to be here to witness this spark, when a student is vulnerable in their work and takes risks, and then you see them light up, and then we all light up and they carry that home with them, too.

I know I did.

You know, I when I first started, I, first time I came in 2007 and I had the privilege to work with the phenomenal Rikki Ducornet and Dorothy Allison.

I don't know if you, do you know?

Dorothy Allison wrote “Bastard Out of Carolina” and she changed my life, but to get to work with her, she, I didn't know that five years later she would come visit me at my home and teach for my classes, for our shop in Port Townsend.

and and stay with us and, read my work and comment on it.

And then, she, the lives that she changed, all the instructors, every instructor that I have met here has changed many, many lives.

And it's beautiful.

And they change each other's lives, the participants.

You know, by talking to each other.

It's it's an incredi.. It's such a critical part of the Port Townsend community, too.

Because it's our hub.

Centrum is everything to this town.

You know, we know where we can go to listen to blues at the Blues Festival.

We can go to Fiddle Fest.

And you're bringing energy, after energy and momentum into this space.

And and artists from all over the world come and bring their art and share it with each other.

And it's a fabulous vibration.

Sounds like a magical place.

It is.

It is so important.