Joy is the River to Run: How to Write Stories That Carry Us to Higher Ground

A 4 week Online Creative Writing Workshop with Amy Irvine
Tuesdays November 4,11,18, and December 2
5:00 – 7:00pm Pacific Time
Registration $240 or $215 for Fishtrappers

Is the registration fee an obstacle for you to attend this workshop? Fishtrap offers a limited number of scholarships to help with the cost. Contact Program Director Mike Midlo for more information. mike@fishtrap.org

The news is pretty grim these days. And the rising tide of AI has us wondering if the days of human-told stories are numbered. But stories–the creation and transmission of them–is as essential to our beings as water. The proof: across the world, throughout history, great stories–along with great acts of humanity and hope–have emerged from the darkest of times. The trick is to find the story that not only uplifts the reader but also buoys the writer. Across genres, we’ll share and be inspired by examples of joy as resistance in all genres of writing. Using generative prompts and practices, we’ll learn to cultivate our own unique sense of delight and wonder on the page, and in our own writing process. We will learn to stay afloat by generating what, in the words of Audre Lorde, “gives us the energy for change.” We’ll learn to challenge our own assumptions about where a story is headed. We’ll begin to imagine, how might this end well?

Amy Irvine’s memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Colorado Book Award. Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to western wilderness icon Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and was included in Orion Magazine’s 25 Most-Read Stories of the Decade, Outside’s Adventure Canon, Backpacker’s New Wilderness Classics, and Recommended Reads from Stanford University’s climate scientists. Irvine’s essays have appeared in Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best American Food Writing series, and she is a contributing editor for Orion. For over a decade she has taught fiction and nonfiction in the Mountainview MFA Program at Southern New Hampshire University; she has also taught for Fishtrap’s Outpost, Whitman College’s Semester in the West, Freeflow Institute, and Orion’s Environmental Writing Workshops at both the Omega Institute in NY and the American Museum of Natural History’s Research Station in Arizona. Irvine will be the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer for University of Montana’s Environmental Humanities Program in spring of 2024. She lives and writes off-grid on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. Her second memoir, Almost Animal, is forthcoming by Spiegel & Grau.