NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH AMY IRVINE | "How to Set Scenes Ablaze"

Human instinct is to contain what burns so it can't get too big, or generate too much force--which is good advice when building a campfire in the arid West. But on the page, our goal is to let the scene blaze across topographical highs and lows--to help it create its own weather. Through language, embodiment and immediacy, we'll learn to write scenes as if they were fevered acts in a Shakespearean play, or heated moments in a Jane Campion film. In other words, we will dramatize the overstory--the forest canopy where a wildfire is a spectacle. But we will also root around in the understory--the part of the fire that burns out of sight--the place from which an unseeable, emotional heat rises and adds velocity.

 

This generative writing workshop welcomes both fiction and nonfiction writers; we'll be creating scenes from scratch through guided exercises and live scene enactments. The format works well for experienced writers but also works for those with more basic skills--all that's needed is a sense of adventure! Together we'll learn how to identify, gather and pile tinder: the specific, exquisite details that make a scene throw sparks. We'll learn how to coax flames from even a common and mild moment, say, watching a raven wing its way between canyon walls, so it ignites the reader's senses. As weather permits, we'll work outside. And we'll move our bodies (to the extent that you are comfortable and/or able to), in and out of the scenes that we create and jump in and out of--which brings the scene alive in a way that almost always blows the writer's mind. This fun and unique process helps writers create moments that put off enough heat to stay with readers long after the flames are doused. 

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POETRY WORKSHOP WITH JAKE SKEETS | ​

(Workshop description to come). Poems are transformative. Our poetry workshop will use student workshop application samples and selected poems written by established poets as a way to learn from individual work and improve writing. In a supportive, creative environment, you will have time to write, revise, and share poems. You’re invited to attend whether you’re an established or beginning poet.

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NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH CRAIG CHILDS | "Let the World Carry You"
Writing can be limited because it comes from inside your head, an object slightly larger than a bowling ball and weighing about the same. It becomes an echo chamber sometimes, sentence after sentence sounding identical. This workshop will help free your mind and free your pen. We will be writing with a variety of prompts and in different environments to get out of ourselves and into what surrounds us. Come with something to write with and on, laptops allowed if that’s your tool of choice. Everyone please bring old school pen and paper for certain assignments. We will be inside and outside. No advanced prep is needed, just show up with your usual headful of stories and we will open it up from there. ​

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FICTION WORKSHOP WITH PAM HOUSTON | "Writing With the Help of the More Than Human World"​

This is a generative workshop open to all levels of writers who are interested in investigating the more than human world, both for its own sake and also to help open doors to the hidden human worlds inside of each of us. By “more than human world” I mean animals, fish, plants, geologic formations, desert, mountain, sky (I could go on) as well as realities that may exist parallel to the realities the dominant culture takes for granted. In this class we will contemplate ourselves as creatures. We will consider models of thinking (practiced historically and currently by Indigenous cultures) of ourselves in relation to the nonhuman beings on this planet that may not have led so inevitably to climate collapse and fascistic uprising (just to name two things). We will consider why the same machine that wants to kill wolf puppies and bear cubs in their dens also wants to deny women, queer and trans people bodily autonomy. We will consider the problematic nature of the word anthropomorphize, of consistently assigning little or no "intelligence" to beings we wish to oppress. We will imagine living within a system where the inherent and ancient knowledge of plants and animals was revered rather than ignored, a world in which more humans learned how to listen. We will listen to the desert together. 

 

We will spend some of our class time each day out in the desert, walking, sitting, writing, noticing, listening. I will offer a series of exercises to be done in and out of the classroom that are designed to help writers get out of their own way, to get out of their logic and into their intuition, and I will use the flora and the fauna and beauty of the desert to help me. Some of you may write deeply into a pinon tree, others may use your discovery a flake of ancient pottery to unlock the story of your divorce. The point is not necessarily to write about the desert, but to ask for the desert’s assistance in writing whatever it is you most need to write. After people sign up, I will send an optional pre-course reading list. I so look forward to being with you and these other fine writers and the Torrey House Crew.