LA GRANDE – Blues riffs from Manhattan Transfer and B.B. King boomed out from a speaker as students filtered into the classroom in Eastern Oregon University’s Loso Hall. Janet Scoubes, a teacher from Elgin, was setting the mood for her workshop: “Blues, Ballads & Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

Three middle school boys took their pencils out and exchanged quizzical looks. A couple of high school girls tapped their feet to the music. At 12:30 p.m. Scoubes started class.

“None of us here are old enough to have had enough pain to write the blues,” she told her dozen students. “But we’re going to do it anyway.”

A moment later the workshop’s signature piece, “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown,” blasted through the classroom.

Scoube’s class was one of 10 offered at “The Write Hands,” the 11th annual student writers’ workshop sponsored by the Oregon Writing Project at EOU. More than 200 elementary and secondary students came to La Grande from Pendleton, John Day, Ukiah, Pine- Eagle, Drewsey, Stanfield, and other small towns scattered across northeast Oregon.

“They’re here because they want to be here,” said Cherie Murray, the workshop coordinator. “We treat them like college students. The expectations are high and we get young people who love to write.”

The workshop gives students from the smaller schools in the OWP’s 10-county service area a chance to visit a college campus and meet other students.

“Kids need that interaction,” Murray said. “I see them walk away with addresses from other kids, so they can pen-pal.”

The teachers, all from northeast Oregon schools, are members of the OWP at Eastern. They have attended a four-week summer session and use techniques from the affiliated National Writing Project in their classrooms.

Sara Gilliland, a senior at Ukiah High School, likes the variety of classes.

“It’s helped my writing a lot, especially making it more vivid,” she said. This was her seventh year at the workshop.

“Sara was writing like crazy this morning,” said her friend Madison Corley, also a senior at Ukiah High School. Corley especially enjoyed the keynote presentation by cowboy poet Marty Campbell of Pendleton.

“When he talked about the rodeo,” she said, “I’m like, whoa, apparently I don’t speak fluent cowboy. I was cracking up.”

That afternoon, following a revision session, each student handed in one piece of the day’s writing. The workshop’s anthology has become a tradition in the participating schools. This year’s edition will be put together by students from Elgin High School’s Future Business Leaders of America.

“With the anthology, you have a chance to feel like you’re published,” said Noella Grady, a junior who chose the piece she had written in Janet Scoubes’ blues and ballads workshop.

In three or four months the completed anthologies will go into the mail. All across northeast Oregon excited students will open their copies and search for the pieces they wrote – published authors with their words in print.