Our Mission
The mission of Straw Dog Writers Guild is to support the writing community by strengthening, engaging, and connecting writers at all levels of development.
We are a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to the craft and transformative power of writing, designed to serve writers throughout the region by promoting individual growth, community outreach and enrichment, and community building.
Straw Dog Writers Guild unites and inspires writers throughout our diverse community.
We support writers through:
Craft workshops
Open Mics
Social gatherings
Networking
Writing Residencies
High School Scholarships
Emerging Writers Fellowship
New members are always welcome!
Straw Dog Writers Guild is a volunteer 501(c)3 organization, committed to paying writers for their presentations. Your tax-deductible memberships and donations help support them.
 We strongly encourage participation in our organization by people of all abilities, ages, ethnicities, genders, national origins or ancestries, socioeconomic statuses, races, formerly incarcerated statuses, religions, and sexualities.
Why Straw Dog? Back in 2010 a group of writers committed themselves to starting a writing network to support and nurture writers in the four western counties. They came up with “Straw Dog” as a way to describe a first draft; an idea to be worked on, built upon, or amplified. The dictionary defines a straw dog as an argument set up so as to be refuted or knocked down. What resonated with the founders about the name was that all writers, at any stage of development, start with a rough draft and then we revise, refute, knock down, rebuild, revise some more.