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

This generative workshop focuses on our senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste), metaphors that most resonate with us (what I call hunks of the physical world), and following them to the stories we have to tell. I trust the physical world to give me the story ingredients I need, and I know that when I am in the presence of one of those hunks of the physical world, it may well reveal the secret and profound parts of my story. I want to lead, at least in a first draft, with my intuition and my heart. I believe I have a much better chance of telling a truer story if I do it this way—a story that is truer to me, and a story that bears witness to the Earth and all her particularities (white fir, roan horse, kingfisher, riverbank, etc) because I love Her so much, and know that every story I have ever told comes from Her.

 

We will spend some of our class time each day out in the desert, walking, sitting, writing, noticing, listening. I will offer 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 us. Some of you may write deeply into the night sky that stretches from wall to wall above the canyon, others may use the colors of the canyons to imagine a future world or a past one, others might hear your ancestors, or even your most obnoxious ex-boyfriend, offering up dialogue in the riffles of the Virgin River. 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.

 

I am going to recommend (but not require) books as pre-course reading. The Lost Journals of Sacajawea by Debra Earling, Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigley, and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko.

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NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH AMY IRVINE | The “Me” in Memoir: How to Write a Story That is Both Personal and Panoramic
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This workshop is suitable for any level of writer, and any sort of nonfiction in which the writer’s personal POV and experience are included. In this workshop, we will explore examples of writing in which larger stories exert influence on the author’s experience, and how different writers connect the two on the page. Together we’ll learn to consider the context as a kind of character that the narrator must reckon with; even the most personal story cannot occur in a vacuum. Ecosystem. Family. Culture. And the ancestral origins—those who came before. We’ll map these stories as concentric rings that encircle our own; some are larger, more abstract (think watershed or patriarchy) and some are quite tangible (the dwindling Great Salt Lake or the bear who crashed the family picnic). We’ll learn how to explore and marble this contextual information into our writing. We’ll play with moving intuitively in and out of the story that focuses on “I” to the wider, more universal story of “Us.” This move protects the story from reading as mere navel-gazing, as memoirs and personal narratives can be accused of. Weaving our story into a larger social and environmental fabric also allows more people to connect with it—and isn’t that what most storytellers desire? To reach as large an audience as possible?

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POETRY WORKSHOP WITH JAKE SKEETS | Field Notes, Circuits, Waters, Rooms, Wind

 

This workshop will focus on writing place as a Living System. We will approach place not as just as scenery but as a living system often shaped by language, memory, force, and attention. Poetry often registers the conditions of that system: bureaucratic structures, perceptual circuitry, flowing processes, domestic ecologies, and atmospheric pressures. We will examine how inherited language structures perception, often administrative, urban, and institutional. We will slow things down and interrogate the systems embedded in the pastoral. We will ask: What language followed us here? What language governs how we see?​

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NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA | Unearthing Your Voice: A Workshop to Contact your Wild and Fertile Heart​

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Recording the ground requires sensitive gear designed to isolate faint low-frequency rumbles. Healthy soil sings, my ancestors asserted for millennia, and now scientists too have confirmed the earth’s song. Contact microphones detect earthworms and beetles, a soundtrack of crackles lifting from the land. Though it may be hard for us to hear, we know it is vital, for the earth’s recorded music reveals her fertility, stamina, and strength.

We too have music ticking in our bodies, recorded over a lifetime, embedded in bones and muscle, emitting from our fascia, making us well or sick. Sometimes we lose contact with our innermost longing, the stories we need to heal. Many of us feel overwhelmed by violence against the land, and too often the endangerment of the earth contributes to the loss of our creative nature. Overbuilt and excavated, our intuition, like the earth, can be fragile. The beauty of the natural world has been looted, and as it fades so dies the movement of our inner dreams.

But the storyteller fights back. To write, we must separate the world’s brassy clangs from the music of our lives. Much has been written about second sight, a way of knowing that extends beyond regular vision. In this workshop, we will use prompts designed to unearth a second set of ears. We will point contact microphones toward our body’s soil, connecting with our deepest memories and wisdom. In this way, I will encourage you to hear your histories, your creaking limbs, your hopeful heart. To seize the vitality of dreamers and storytellers, you must strain to hear the stories only you can tell. My job is to facilitate that listening.