Writing, Literature, Journaling

Through this workshop, I invite you to see your sketchbook not as a preparatory tool, but as a complete and meaningful body of work. Each sketchbook becomes a visual record of your experiences—unified by a personal theme, shaped by observation, reflection, and memory. Over time, this practice can transform how you build skills, capture moments, […]

Writing and Taiji for Balance merges two uniquely effective methods for quieting the mind, connecting with the environment, and inviting valuable mental, emotional, physical and spiritual insights. Writing topics will engage the senses with the remarkable surroundings of Ghost Ranch, while basic principles of the ancient martial art of taiji will open new ways to […]

Theodore Roethke wrote in his poem, “The Waking,”  “I learn by going where I have to go.”  As poets, in order to perfect our craft and become more accomplished writers, we need to go to the work of other poets. We need to study how poets we admire address themes and subjects important to us.  […]

“Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.” — Eudora Welty, from One Writer’s Beginnings Eudora Welty was right. But it’s not only children whose memories are fragmentary, like snapshots. For many or most of us, the significant times of our lives appear as […]

How does place affect the story we tell? The way we tell the story? With Ghost Ranch and the high desert as our playground, we will explore the connections of place to story, and of words to images. Participants will use their phone cameras in sophisticated and artful ways, creating narrative imagery about their Ghost […]

The number one thing I hear from my writing students is that they want “accountability”—in other words, they want to be forced to get writing done. And yet, while writing workshops provide helpful deadlines, they can also paralyze creativity. Workshops are often where fiction can start to feel like “work.” Once it’s time to listen to and incorporate feedback, the next stage of writing can feel daunting, and the excitement that led you to produce a piece of work might feel unavailable, or worse, crushed. This class takes as its starting point the idea that writing should never be a […]

In this generative writing course, we’ll delve into the pleasure and potency of flash nonfiction. Defined as stand-alone nonfiction prose of less than 1000 words, flash nonfiction is an emerging form that seeks to capture life’s richness in a small space. It aligns in some ways with flash fiction and prose poetry, but it is […]

The ten-minute play is the ode/short story of the Theatre, and it’s a true community-builder. Like a box of crackerjacks—we can’t “eat” just one. If you’re a Teacher or a Church Program Director or just a lover of Theatre, in this safe place we may explore family connections, we might bring historical events and Bible […]

This is an innovative workshop in “essaying”  – the practice of discovering what we think about ourselves, others, and the world through writing and creative artistic practices. Together, we’ll explore various  approaches to the written essay. In daily craft sessions we’ll cover the fundamentals including voice, perspective, and connecting the personal to the universal. Throughout the week, […]