The course: This will be a 6-week prose workshop that will be about using the physical world around us to access our inner depths and draw out the best stories we have to tell. I am particularly interested, these days, in the nonhuman world and how much we as humans have to learn from it. We will talk in class about various elements of craft, and we will read a variety of free online stories and essays (and possibly one book I will ask you to buy or borrow) that engage with all things related to this topic (which if you think about it, is really all things). There will be in-class writing exercises and take-home writing exercises, and we may even do a mini-workshop near the end of our time together on one of these exercises that has grown into something that wants to have more than one draft. Our discussions will range from elements of craft (image, metaphor, dialogue, structure, character, scene) to the importance of honest art-making in the face of widespread corruption and climate collapse. Why should we sing about the dying world? Because, because it would be so much worse not to! 

The Instructor: 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. Photo by Mike Blakeman.

Duration: This class meets over six Wednesdays from  5-8 pm ET, April 5 – May 17 (skipping May 10th).

Application period: Applications closed. 

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