writing workshop

MWF: “Writing Non-Human Narrators” with Claire Boyles

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9 – 10:30 “Writing non-human narrators” with Claire Boyles

Storytelling has a long tradition of non-human narrators. Myths and fables are full of them, as is children’s literature—the Redwall series, for example, and Watership Down. In an interview about writing the natural world, Richard Powers made a case for centering the non-human in contemporary literary fiction as well: “I’m saying the contemporary literary novel has forgotten a third kind of dramatic conflict, which used to be at the heart and soul of most stories that we told ourselves. Not a person against their own self, or people against each other, but the hopes and fears and dreams of the entire human race trying to come to terms with all of the things that non-humans want.” In this workshop, we’ll read and discuss examples of non-human narrators that populate recent literary fiction from Powers, Deb Olin Unferth, and Ted Chiang, among others, and we’ll create and give voice to non-human characters of our own. While these characters may have essential and serious roles in our storytelling, we’ll approach this work with a spirit of experimentation and play.

Claire Boyles (she/her) is a writer, mom, and former farmer who lives and writes in Colorado. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Site Fidelity, which was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and the Best of the West Award and is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her writing has appeared in VQR, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, and Masters Review, among others. She is a Peter Taylor Fellow for the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops and has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation, the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers Workshop, and the Community of Writers. She teaches in Eastern Oregon University’s low-residency MFA program in Creative and Environmental Writing.

MWF: “Fierce Writing from the Heart” with DK Hawk

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Mountain Words Festival

“Fierce Writing from the Heart” with DK Hawk

3 – 4 pm

“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

MWF: “Writing our Wastelands” with Molly Murfee

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Our Wastelands are destroyed, dismembered, and disemboweled places. Here, all is not right. Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious and archetypes combine with storytelling, poems and mythology, leading the way into a mystical world of sacred and animate nature. Connecting to the earth through meditations, actively listen to the wounded and forgotten places of the Wastelands. Learn to speak the land’s language, then enter into a conversation with it. What is the land trying to communicate? What does it need? Explore through generative freewriting what has historically, culturally and philosophically paved the way for the Wastelands, as well as what your relationship and responsibility is to them. How can you lend your voice to the Wastelands? What is your calling or purpose here? This inspirational workshop lends the tools to process and intentionally interact with the grave issues of climate change and environmental destruction with a sense of empowerment rather than despair. Any focused writer—from fiction to poetry to creative nonfiction and beyond—is welcome, as well as participants simply seeking ways to creatively interact with the grave issues of our times. Logistics: Please meet in the lobby of the Center so we can carpool to our workshop location. This is an outdoor workshop with a small amount of easy walking, and sitting on the ground. Wear comfortable walking shoes, and bring a small backpack with water, a warm layer, a rain jacket, a sun hat or visor, sunscreen, lip balm, sunglasses and a portable camp chair if you have one. Also bring a journal and writing utensil (instead of a laptop, tablet, or cell phone). Drawing tools such as colored pencils are welcome.

Creative non-fiction and place-based author Molly Murfee has studied, written, and taught nature writing, ecofeminism, mythology, creative writing, and indigenous culture and history for over three decades. Molly is the 2023 Local Writer-in-Residence for Mountain Words. She is the author of the Earth Muffin Memos blog featured in the Crested Butte News and online, focused on fostering environmental and social change. Her over 500 published articles have appeared in venues such as Mountain Journal, the Mountain Gazette, and Powder Magazine, as well as community outlets such as the Crested Butte Magazine. She holds Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in literature, creative writing, and environmental writing; and has served as faculty teaching the same with Colorado College, Colorado State University, and the Audubon Expedition Institute at Lesley University. Molly currently teaches expedition-based nature writing and environmental ethics courses with the Clark Family School of Environment & Sustainability at Western Colorado University. Additionally a field educator and wilderness guide, her writing workshops connect people to place through immersions in nature. As a creative activist, she co-directs the Autumn Equinox celebration, Vinotok, generating earth-honoring and community-building practices through storytelling, mythmaking, public art, and street theatre. Her recognitions include: finalist for the 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction; contributor to the 2022 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference; Career Advancement Award from the Colorado Creative Industries; and an Artistic Enrichment Grant from the Crested Butte Arts Festival, among other honors. Molly’s book in progress, The Adventure of Home, is a creative nonfiction book re-membering our indigeneity to this Earth through braided lyrical narratives unravelling patriarchy, capitalism, Christianity and colonialism, and reweaving mythologies of a sacred wild.

MWF: “How to Write and Pitch an Op-ed” with Megan Kate Nelson

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How to Write and Pitch an Op-ed
In the first part of this workshop, we will discuss why you might want to write an Op-ed, how to pitch and write one, and what to expect in the editing and publication process. In the second part, we will read and discuss several pitch examples and then write and workshop Op-ed topics and takeaways.

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books, including Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022; winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction) and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History). She writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, she taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and now lives in Boston with her husband and two cats.

“Using Fiction-Writing Techniques to Bring Life to Your Nonfiction” with James McGrath Morris

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“Using Fiction-Writing Techniques to Bring Life to Your Nonfiction” with James McGrath Morris

Both the New York Times and The Economist have described James McGrath Morris’s nonfiction books as being as readable as a novel. In this workshop, Morris will share the tools that novelist use that can be adapted to narrative nonfiction works. Building tension, using foreshadowing, engaging in scene building, Freytag’s pyramid, and other successful techniques of fiction can bring life to nonfiction without straying from the cardinal rule of that one cannot make anything up. All levels

James McGrath Morris is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling author. He is the author of Tony Hillerman: A Life, a finalist for the Edgar and the Oklahoma Book Award. His preview works include The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War; Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press; and Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power. Morris has worked in publishing and book distribution for over a decade and has written extensively on the topic.

MWF: “The Political. The Personal. the Poets.” workshop with Suzi Q Smith

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3 – 4:30 pm “The Political. The Personal. the Poets.” with Suzi Q Smith

In this generative workshop, we will read poems that offer a focus on the intersections of political and personal experiences through a poetic lens. We will consider the long-held traditions of poetry as a tool for communal voice, emotional evocation, and social memory and change, and examine our own relationships to that history. Participants will write from prompts and then, depending on time, share some of their writing. Appropriate for all levels of experience.

Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning artist, organizer, and educator who lives in Denver, Colorado. The author of poetry collections Poems for the End of the World, A Gospel of Bones, and Thirteen Descansos, Suzi is also a singer-songwriter, playwright, and multi-disciplinary creative. Currently, she is working on her first memoir while she serves as the [margins.] Director for The Word. Suzi is Affiliate Faculty with Regis University’s Mile High MFA, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and DU’s Prison Arts Initiative, and she serves as a community representative on the Denver County Cultural Council for SCFD.

MWF: “Origins of the Original” workshop with Rebecca Makkai

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“Origins of the Original” workshop with Rebecca Makkai

For writing to succeed, it must be both well-executed and original. But when we sit down to write, the first words, scenes, characters, conflicts, and settings we come up with are often the least original ones of which we’re capable. Digging past the obvious, the stock (and even the products of the collective unconscious), we might finally arrive at stories that are strikingly new and memorable. In this class we’ll cover some key elements of originality — specificity, idiosyncrasy, complexity, repetition, and change — and talk about accessing them in both drafting and revision.

While originality might seem intuitive, or even a product of the writer’s personality, it’s in fact a skill that can be sharpened. That’s what we’ll be doing.

Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Her work has been translated into 20 languages, and her short fiction has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XLI (2017), The Best American Short Stories 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 and 2009, New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Fantasy, and featured on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and This American Life.

Her first novel, The Borrower, was a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, and an O Magazine selection.

Her second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is the story of a haunted house and a haunted family, told in reverse; Library Journal called it “stunning, ambitious, readable and intriguing.” It was chosen as the Chicago Writers Association’s novel of the year, and received raves in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.

Her short story collection, Music for Wartime, appeared in July, 2015. It was printed on paper made from that one tree that fell in the forest when no one was there to hear it.

MWF: “Turning History Into Narrative” with Joel Warner

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Maybe there’s a family legend that you’ve always wanted to put down on paper. Maybe you want to try your hand at your own version of Outlander. Maybe you’ve found the perfect real-life historical tale that’s crying out for the Erik Larson treatment. Whatever your interest, the past – both recent and distant – provides ample fodder for thrilling fiction and nonfiction. In this hands-on class, we’ll deconstruct historical passages and learn how to use search databases, archives, research trips, and other historical detective work to recreate moments from the past and turn them into gripping narratives.

 

Joel Warner is an author, journalist, and editor. He is author of The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History, and co-author of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. He currently serves as managing editor of the award-winning investigative news outlet The Lever, and his writing has appeared in Esquire, Wired, Newsweek, Men’s Journal, Men’s Health, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, Slate, and Grantland, among many other publications. He lives with his family in Denver, Colorado.

MWC: “How to write scenes about the (complicated) places you love” with Heather Hansman

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How to write scenes about the (complicated) places you love

Scenes and descriptive stories about landscapes can be the most evocative pieces of literature to read, but they can also be the hardest to  write. In a two-hour outdoor workshop with environmental journalist, and author of the books Powder Days and Downriver, Heather Hansman, we’ll cover the elements that make descriptive, narrative scenes work well, practice writing exercises, and workshop our own scenes about the places we love and care about.

Led by Heather Hansman, outdoors

Heather Hansman is an award-winning journalist and author whose work covers the intersection of people, places, and natural resources. She’s the author of Downriver: Into the future of water in the West, and Powder Days: Ski bums, ski towns, and the future of chasing snow. She’s a contributing editor at Outside and Backcountry magazines, and her work has been featured in The New York TImes, The Atlantic, High Country News, and included in the Best American Essays. She lives in the San Juan Mountains.