Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories – from those contained in her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, to her most recent New Yorker story, “Casting Shadows,” are quietly transformational and manage to be both micro and macrocosms of modernity. Lahiri’s work offers a master class in fiction craft, and in this workshop, we’ll discuss what we can learn as writers from Lahiri’s technique. We’ll specifically look at Lahiri’s use of point of view to drive narrative in Lahiri’s stories “Hell-Heaven,” “Year’s End,” and “Casting Shadows,” and we’ll conclude with exercises for practicing the craft techniques we discuss. Reading Lahiri’s stories prior to the workshop is recommended but not required. For copies of the stories, email brooke@crestedbuttearts.org
Mountain Words Literary Festival
Fierce Writing from the Heart
“Let’s get fierce on the page! I help people who don’t fancy themselves writers, to go ahead and write. Let’s revel in the mess and wriggle free from the ego. One part creative practice, one part connecting-with-others practice, my weekly writing circles help us explore our hearts and lives on the page. No judgment. No criticism. Just writing and listening to each other in deep ways.” — DK HAWK
DK Hawk: Taking photos, sketching, collaging and putting words on the page make me feel alive. Connection with kindred spirits is the cinnamon on my apple pie. Through these creative practices, I’ve learned to speak my truth and find my voice. I allow myself to be seen for who I truly am – not what I thought the world wanted me to be. I’ve also learned that my story is important and I never know who may need to hear it.
More on DK.
“Book Length Considerations” with Laura Pritchett
Book Length Considerations (a.k.a. Actually Thinking Through Your Book and Thus Save Supremely Important Things Such As Time, Energy, and Backaches from Typing)
Half-day workshop with Laura Pritchett
This half-day intensive class (limited capacity) is for those who are working on book-length projects—and need to think through structure, point of view, scope, arc, themes, and pacing of a longer work—as well as the psychology of wedding oneself to a long-term project. The class is appropriate for fiction and nonfiction, although be aware that some discussions will pertain more to one genre than the other. It is most helpful for those in the beginning or middle stages of writing a book (it does not focus on generating initial ideas, nor does it focus on final revision and submission) and is meant for writers who have been seriously engaged with their craft for some time.
If you can, please bring the first 3 pages of your work, a one-paragraph synopsis, and a rough 1 page outline—enough copies for everyone (approx 10 copies).
Included in Mountain Words Literary Festival Pass, or $75 single entry ($300 value).
At the Center.
Masks required.
Saturday Night Festival Readings
Join us for some heavy-hitting readings by Rachel Monroe, Nick Arvin, Laura Pritchett, and Nate Marshall. Drinks available.
Rachel Monroe’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, and the Atlantic, where she is a contributing writer. Her first book, Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (Scribner) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a best book of the year by Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, and Jezebel. More on Rachel.
Nick Arvin’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. His writing has been honored with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Library Association, the Isherwood Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a two-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his novel Articles of War was selected for the One Book, One Denver program. More on Nick
Laura Pritchett is the author of five novels and two nonfiction books and editor of three anthologies. Her work has been the recipient of the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA, the High Plains Book Award, and others. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Sun, Salon, Orion, High Country News, The Millions, Publisher’s Weekly, The Normal School, The Pinch, The Cincinnati Review, and many others. She directs the Nature Writing concentration for the MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University. She lives in her native Colorado. www.laurapritchett.com
Nate Marshall is a writer, rapper, and educator from the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of FINNA (One World, Penguin Random House, 2020), Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s award for Poetry Book of the Year and The Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award. Marshall is also an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015) and the co-author, with Eve Ewing, of No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. His rap album, Grown came out in 2015 with his group Daily Lyrical Product. Marshall is a member of The Dark Noise Collective and co-director of Crescendo Literary. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, and The University of Michigan. More on Nate.
Panel discussion “Writing in Place, Place in Writing”
Panel: “Writing in Place, Place in Writing” with Nate Marshall, Steven Dunn, Laura Krantz, and Pam Houston in conversation with Arvin Ram
Nate Marshall is a writer, rapper, and educator from the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of FINNA (One World, Penguin Random House, 2020), Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s award for Poetry Book of the Year and The Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award. Marshall is also an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015) and the co-author, with Eve Ewing, of No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. His rap album, Grown came out in 2015 with his group Daily Lyrical Product. Marshall is a member of The Dark Noise Collective and co-director of Crescendo Literary. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, and The University of Michigan. More on Nate.
Steven Dunn is the author of the novels Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016) and water & power (Tarpaulin Sky 2018) He was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy, he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. He teaches Creative Writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA. Some of his work can be found in Columbia Journal, Granta Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2018.
Laura Krantz is a journalist, editor and producer, in both radio and print. The first season of her podcast, Wild Thing received critical acclaim, including from The Atlantic, which named it one of the best podcasts of 2018.Laura is a founding partner of Foxtopus Ink, where she runs the audio division and oversees the creation and development of shows such as Wild Thing and The Syndicate. Laura has been in audio for well over a decade – she recently served as the interim science editor for PRX, which included editing work on the Smithsonian’s Sidedoor and Air/Space podcasts. Prior to that, she edited and produced for NPR in Washington, DC and for KPCC in Los Angeles.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the ReadingThe West Advocacy Award and even more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness as well as five other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton.
“Faith and Philosophy: The Deep Beliefs of Your Characters” with Nick Arvin
Faith and Philosophy: The Deep Beliefs of Your Characters
Characters who want something and who have something at stake in a story are more interesting characters — but what if you need to know what a character believes, at the deepest level, before you can know what they really want and what they truly have at risk? In this seminar we will look at how to deepen our characters by forcing ourselves to explicitly examine and describe our characters’ beliefs in terms of the timeless questions of faith and philosophy, and to work through how those beliefs provide a foundation for the wants and stakes that will propel a story. Come prepared for in-class discussion and short writing exercises.
Nick Arvin’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. His writing has been honored with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Library Association, the Isherwood Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a two-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his novel Articles of War was selected for the One Book, One Denver program. More on Nick
Friday Night Festival Readings + Karen Chamberlain Award
Friday Festival Readings + Karen Chamberlain Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Readings from Colorado Poet Laureate, Bobby Lefebre; author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, winner of the Colorado Book Award, Pam Houston; Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker Manuel Aragon; and author of Potted Meat and water & power, Steven Dunn. Award ceremony with Art Goodtimes presenting Colorado poet, Kate Kingston. In the Steddy Theater.
Bobby LeFebre is an award-winning writer, performer, and cultural worker fusing a non-traditional multi-hyphenated professional identity to imagine new realities, empower communities, advance arts and culture, and serve as an agent of provocation, transformation, equity and social change. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Guardian, American Theater Magazine, NPR, and Poets.Org. More on Bobby.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award and even more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness as well as five other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton.
Steven Dunn is the author of the novels Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2016) and water & power (Tarpaulin Sky 2018) He was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy, he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. He teaches Creative Writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA. Some of his work can be found in Columbia Journal, Granta Magazine, and Best Small Fictions 2018. http://www.stevencdunn.com/
Manuel Aragon is a Latinx writer, director, and filmmaker from Denver, CO. He is currently working on a short story collection, Norteñas. Norteñas is a collection of speculative fiction short stories centered in the Northside, a Mexican and Mexican- American centered part of Denver, and the people, ghosts, and demons that live there. His work has appeared in ANMLY. His short story, “A Violent Noise,” was nominated for the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Art Goodtimes is an American poet, farmer and politician in Colorado. Goodtimes was first elected to the San Miguel County Board of Commissioners in 1996 as a Democrat. Retired in 2016 after five terms as Colorado’s only Green Party county commissioner, Art Goodtimes has won numerous awards for his political activism including from the Dept. of Interior, the Forest Service, conservative Club 20 of Grand Junction, as well as serving on dozens of boards and commissions on the local, regional, state and national levels. He co-founded the Sheep Mountain Alliance, Telluride’s local environmental group, in 1988.
Writers in Residence Read + Reception
The 2021 Mountain Words Writer-in-Residence Chris La Tray, Chelsey Johnson, Lee Anderson and Adam Valen Levinson read from work produced during their monthslong residency in Crested Butte. Drinks and bites included. In the Center’s Steddy Theater.
Chris La Tray is a Métis writer and storyteller. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large (2018, Riverfeet Press) won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His next book, Becoming Little Shell, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2022. Chris is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians and lives near Missoula, Montana.
Chelsey Johnson’s debut novel Stray City came out with Custom House/HarperCollins in 2018, and her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, and NPR’s Selected Shorts, among others. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts. Born and raised in rural northern Minnesota, she now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she is an associate professor of fiction at Northern Arizona University’s MFA and undergraduate programs. A second novel is in the works.
Lee Anderson is a nonbinary MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, where they are the Managing Editor of Thin Air Magazine. They have been published sporadically but with zest, with work appearing or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, Unstamatic Magazine, and more.
Adam Valen Levinson is the author of the “nonfiction novel” The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah (W. W. Norton, 2017) — dubbed “Eat, Pray, Laugh” by The New York Times but/and not without its controversy. National Book Critics Circle award winner for poetry Morgan Parker called him “an incredibly generous, compassionate, and thorough writer who gorgeously blends lyricism with reportage and philosophy with confession.” Adam has written, filmed, and photographed for Al Jazeera, The Paris Review, Haaretz, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and VICE, and done college stints at the Meccas of real fake news: The Colbert Report and The Onion. He has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College and an MPhil in Sociology from Yale University, where he is a fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology. All of his stories are true.
“The Physical Stuff of Your Life” writing workshop with Pam Houston
The Physical Stuff of Your Life (and how to use it to gain access to the emotional stuff); A Generative Workshop with Pam Houston.
In this generative workshop we will focus on all the ways the sensory details that surround us—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures—can give us access to that much more elusive interior landscape we are always trying to access when we write. If we write those details all the way down to the bone. If we sit in the dark with them and let them distill up from the swamps of memory. We will focus on what I believe to be the real artistry of prose writing: the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup of our lived and witnessed experience and pull out what we need; the way we pick up hunks of the physical world and bring them back to the page, translated into language.
We will be aiming for work in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. We will work toward demystifying some of the essential components of prose writing (image, metaphor, structure, dialogue, character, scene, among others) and turning them into comprehensible tools that are at our disposal. We will all, no doubt, be humbled in the face of languages unlimited possibility as well as its limitation. At the same time we will honor (and hope for) the inexplicable flights of creativity (and madness?) that take a good story and make it great.
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award and even more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness as well as five other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches at UC Davis and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and the fiction editor at the Environmental Arts Journal Terrain.org.
Mountain Words Literary Festival Announces Expansion of Inaugural “Writer-in-Residence” Program
MOUNTAIN WORDS LITERARY FESTIVAL
ANNOUNCES HUGE EXPANSION OF THEIR INAUGURAL “WRITER IN RESIDENCE” PROGRAM
FIRST COHORT EXPANDED TO INCLUDE FOUR DIVERSE, POWERFUL LITERARY VOICES
Crested Butte, CO (March 6) – When Brooke MacMillian, Director of Literary Arts and Lectures at The Crested Butte Center for the Arts in Crested Butte, Colorado, first conceived of a “Writer In Residence” program, she had a modest but exciting vision.
“Initially, we thought it would be great to have a single writer join us in Crested Butte for four weeks, working on their writing and being inspired by our stunning natural beauty. You know, start small,” said MacMillan. “Then we were flooded with applications from truly brilliant writers, in all genres and from places all across the world, and we just knew that one writer was not going to be enough.”
After looking at budgets, consulting the Literary Arts Advisory Council, Center staff decided to quadruple the number of available residencies, going from one writer to four. “We aren’t 100% sure, but our best guess is that this group represents one of the largest and most diverse gatherings of writers in residence ever for an inaugural residency program. We just can’t find another example of a first-year writer-in-residence program with this scope or ambition,” said Center Executive Director, Scott Palmer, “We are thrilled and very proud.”
The 2021 cohort includes writers and poets from a huge range of backgrounds and voices, including poet and novelist, Chris La Tray, novelist Chelsey Johnson, essayist Lee Anderson, and Adam Valen Levinson.
La Tray, a Métis writer, storyteller, and enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, will focus his four week residency on completing a chapbook of poetry borne from a daily, writing ritual that spanned for over a year. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large (2018, Riverfeet Press) won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His next book, Becoming Little Shell, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2022.
Chelsey Johnson’s debut novel Stray City came out with Custom House/HarperCollins in 2018, and her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, and NPR’s Selected Shorts, among others. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Signal Fire Arts. Born and raised in rural northern Minnesota, she now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she is an associate professor of fiction at Northern Arizona University.
At the residency, Johnson will focus on completing her latest novel, Refuge on North American wolves and “the politics around their near-extinction and recovery, controversies and complex histories around public land use in the west; and thorny questions about how people craft “true” narratives—about ourselves, about others, and about our sense of entitlement to the lands we occupy.”
Lee Anderson, a nonbinary MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, is the Managing Editor of Thin Air Magazine. Lee’s work can be found in The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, and Unstamatic Magazine. Anderson plans to work on completing a hybrid novel series of essays exploring their experiences as a nonbinary, transmasculine person.
Also joining the group is Visiting Author, Adam Valen Levinson who is an affiliate of the Middle East Institute, and a Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, where he studies senses of humor as a key to cross-cultural understanding. In 2018, the International Society of Humor Scholars granted him their Young Scholar Award. He has written, filmed, and photographed for Al Jazeera, The Paris Review, Haaretz, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and VICE, and did college stints at the Meccas of real fake news: The Colbert Report and The Onion. His first book, The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah came out in 2017, and he will be focusing his month in Crested Butte on his next book, 302’d which explores psychiatric facilities in the U.S.
The residency, a program of the Center’s Literary Arts & Lectures program aims to support emerging writers with time, means (a sizable stipend is included), and space to write and create in Crested Butte. Selected writers are lodged in downtown Crested Butte while given access to the Center’s Writers Room.
While writers of all genres and backgrounds were encouraged to apply, in keeping with the mission of the Center, the selection committee was committed to supporting diverse, underserved, and marginalized writers, with the goal of helping to develop emerging writers and build the careers of working writers.
“We are enormously excited to present this opportunity to writers. A month of focused writing time in our warm and supportive community, and against the stunning and rejuvenating Rocky Mountain backdrop, is a special gift to be able to give,” said MacMillan. “We are thrilled at the lineup of voices and projects that will undoubtedly enrich our community with new perspectives and ideas.”
The residency will come to a close at the Mountain Words Literary Festival, May 28 – 30 where La Tray, Johnson, and Anderson will read and present their residency-produced work. More info can be found at gvlf.org.
Any questions can be directed to:
Brooke MacMillan
Director of Literary Arts & Lectures
Center for the Arts | Crested Butte
brooke@crestedbuttearts.org
Phone: 970-349-6247