writing workshop

MWLF: “The Language We Inherent” workshop with Suzi Q. Smith

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“The Language We Inherit” We will discuss techniques to explore the language we inherit and ways we use it to navigate writing and our understanding of the world. Participants will explore their own stories, identities, experiences, ideas, and self-language through reading, writing, and discussion. We will engage in a wide range of texts and other media to evaluate approaches to create mental imagery, suggest mood, develop tension and movement, and set tone. How do we stretch and create movement within a poem? How do we establish the emotional color and landscape? How do we know when to turn? We will navigate texts from across genres to identify tools and approaches to invite and engage readers. Participants will write from prompts and then, depending on time, share some of their writing.

Suzi Q. Smith is an award-winning artist, organizer, and educator who lives in Denver, Colorado. She has created, curated, coached, and taught in Denver for over 20 years, managing the largest poetry festivals that Denver has seen to date. 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 Affiliate Faculty with Regis University’s Mile High MFA, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and DU’s Prison Arts Initiative, and she serves as the [margins.] Conference Director for The Word.

Website: https://www.suziqsmith.com

Twitter: @suziqpoet

MWLF: “The Writer as Witness” with Shelley Read

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Anna Akhmatova’s stunning poem, Requiem, opens with terrorized women queuing at the cold prison gates in Stalinist Leningrad, hoping to glimpse their captured loved ones. When a woman with blue lips whispers to the poet, Can you describe this?, Akhmatova replies with three powerful words: Yes, I can.

In challenging times, writers often wonder how our craft can meaningfully respond to the moment. One answer lies in the extraordinary power of the writer as witness. This workshop will draw inspiration from the long tradition of the writer as witness in global literature. We will also explore the role that both our collective and private experiences play in the stories we want to tell and discover how to write with the precision and honesty these stories deserve.

Shelley Read’s debut novel, Go As A River, is forthcoming from publisher Spiegel & Grau. She recently retired as a Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and Honors for nearly three decades. Shelley is a regular contributor to Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal. Her writing has also appeared in The Denver Post, The Breeder, Paradise Review, Mountain Kids Magazine, Foothills Literary Journal, and Denver Clarion. Shelley holds an MA from Temple University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. She also completed a double major BA in English and journalism at the University of Denver, a graduate fellowship in aesthetics at Temple University Rome, and PhD coursework and comprehensive exams in literary studies and philosophy as a Dean’s Fellow at the University of Denver.

MWLF: “Three Keys to Flash Fiction: Interruption, Omission, and Quickness”

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What makes flash fiction spark? In this workshop, we’ll explore three keys to flash fiction that works: interruption, omission, and quickness. We’ll look at these techniques in several flash stories, then discuss how we can apply these techniques to our own work. Attendees will leave with several exercises for further exploration.

Candace Nadon holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and PhD in English from Georgia State University. She teaches Creative Writing and literature at Fort Lewis College (her alma mater) and for the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in New Flash Fiction, Five Points, Hartskill Review, New Mexico Review, Platte Valley Review and others. A fifth-generation Coloradan, her work explores the lives of women in the contemporary West.

MWLF: “Writing as Play” with Claire Boyles

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“Writing as Play” Writing can be serious business—hard work of the mind and the heart—and many writers feel a sense of urgency to get their words out of their heads and onto the page. Sometimes, though, all that serious effort can keep us from accessing our most creative, bright, and original ideas. Whatever genre you work in, whatever role writing has in your life, the writing games in this workshop will activate your imagination, inspire new approaches to process, and highlight the joy of creating and sharing work in community.

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.

Murder in the Mtns Festival: Subversive Retellings workshop

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Classic retellings have always been part of what literature does, but perhaps that has never been truer than in this particular climate in which fanfiction, adaptation, and reimaginings of classic texts enable a kind of subversive resistance against old reinforcement of ideologies in order to speak to a new world. This workshop will take a look at some examples of classic retellings from various genres and disciplines in order to speak to what potential retellings offer, and what work they can do against the originals. $35, or included in festival pass.

Addie Tsai (any/all) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. She is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin. Unwieldy Creatures, their adult queer biracial retelling of Frankenstein, is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press in 2022. They are the Fiction Co-Editor at Anomaly, Staff Writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy.

  A Play in a Day; playwriting workshop with Steven Cole Hughes

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Learn to write your own, complete, short play in one day! Actor, director, playwright, and WCU Theatre Director Steven Cole Hughes leads you in learning the basics of playwriting, dialogue, and more before diving into guided writing in this four-hour playwriting blitzkrieg. Lunch break included. All level writers welcome. Scholarships and student pricing available. At the Center.

“Author Deep Dive: Jhumpa Lahiri” with Candace Nadon

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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

“Book Length Considerations” with Laura Pritchett

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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.

“The Physical Stuff of Your Life” writing workshop with Pam Houston

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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.

 

“Faith and Philosophy: The Deep Beliefs of Your Characters” with Nick Arvin

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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

“Writing Erotica 101” with Brian Palmer

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Why has erotica been so popular throughout the last 400 years? What makes an erotic story compelling? How do you take your hottest fantasies and turn them into art that readers will devour? Brian Palmer’s erotica workshop explores structure and strategy in the art of erotica to help workshop-goers learn to tell a compelling, sexy story that will delight and titillate readers. Learn the four essential story beats to an erotic story, how to create tension that will keep readers hooked on the page and, for those hoping to publish erotic stories, how to find your audience by identifying the key marketing elements of any story. Students will leave the workshop ready to write their first stories and market them effectively to a target audience.

Brian Palmer is an independent author and ghostwriter who has written nearly 100 novels and over 30 short stories in the erotica, romance, fantasy, cozy mystery and domestic thriller genres. The only thing he loves more than writing for a living is teaching others to access their creativity and bring their stories to life.

In-person AND Virtual attendance possible.

 

“Applying Film Techniques” with Steven Dunn

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Film uses space and lighting to evoke certain emotions. We will look at ways to make sentences and paragraphs function like how cameras zoom, pan, tilt, etc. We’ll consider what is in the visual frame — the composition of a scene. We’ll discuss high-key and low-key lighting and what effects those produce. We’ll also view a short video that summarizes camera angles, as well as read and examine passages with a filmic quality. Think of some of your favorite films and we’ll also discuss some of the techniques and try to transfer them to writing. At the Center.

Steven Dunn is the author of two novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press: Potted Meat (2016) and water & power (2018), and the chapbook Our Migrations (Business Bear Press, 2018 & 2019) Potted Meat was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists, and adapted to a short film by Foothills Productions. The Usual Route has played at L.A. International Film Festival, Houston International Film Festival, and others. He was born and raised in West Virginia and currently teaches at Regis University’s Mile High MFA. More on Steven

“The Art of the Hook” with Alan Bissett

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Join us for a very special virtual writing workshop with best-selling Scottish author, Alan Bissett. Learn how to ‘hook’ the reader from the start of a short story, pulling them in and keeping them there, and how to develop your story in such a way that it flows and is engaging. Structure is often overlooked in story writing, but it is crucial, and this fun and absorbing session will help you think a bit more about what your narrative needs to cast a spell over the reader.

Scholarships available. Contact Brooke for more info: brooke@crestedbuttearts.org

“Writing the Pandemic” with Mathangi Subramanian

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A timely virtual writing workshop for all level writers and genres. We are living through extraordinary times. How do we document what we are witnessing, feeling, experiencing, while honoring our strengths, frailties, and imaginations?

Mathangi Subramanian, Ed.D., believes stories have the power to change the world. Her middle grades book, Dear Mrs. Naidu, won the South Asia Book Award, and her picture book A Butterfly Smile was inducted into the Nobel Museum by Laureate Dr. Esther Duflo. Her novel A People’s History of Heaven was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a finalist for the LAMBDA literary award and the Valley of Words prize. A former public school teacher, senior policy analyst at the New York City Council, and Fulbright Scholar, she currently consults for Sesame Workshop. She holds a doctorate in education from Columbia Teachers College.