In conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read Project, the High Plains BookFest (Oct. 17-19), the YMCA Writer’s Voice and the Yellowstone Writers’ Collective, the “Wild Bunch,” a group of Montana/Wyoming poets, essayists, and fiction writers, is offering workshop sessions in three area locations.
The writing workshops will provide writers at all levels of experience working in any genre—stories, poems, essays, plays—the opportunity to get feedback from the instructor and from other workshop participants. If demand is sufficient, other members of the Wild Bunch will join the principal instructor.
Here's the schedule:
October 25-26, A.L. Mickelson Field Station, Sunlight Basin, Wyo., $35 (3 meals and overnight), conducted by Burt Bradley, Powell, Wyo.
November 1, Rim Country Land Institute, west of Billings, Mont., $25, conducted by Russell Rowland, Billings
November 8, Rim Country Land Institute, $25, conducted by Tami Haaland, Billings
November 15, Columbus/Stillwater Library, Mont., $25, Bernie Quetchenbach, Billings
Details: Nov. 1, 8, 15 workshops will run 5 hours.
Credit: Participants in either the Oct. 25-26 workshop or a combination of the other three are eligible for MSU-B extension credit.
Call Kim Schweikert at 1-800-708-0068 or (406) 896-5890. For questions regarding workshop times and locations contact Bernie Quetchenbach at 406-248-1028.
Register early! Receive a free pass to BookFest readings on October 18.
How to register: Sessions are limited, so call early! Call the YMCA Writer’s Voice 406-248-1685 ext 231 or email A limited number of scholarships are available; call the Writer’s Voice.
Here are the details on Burt Bradley and his workshop on October 25-26 at the A. L. Mickelson Field Station:
Description: This is an on-site nature writing workshop. To understand the “wild” takes what Gary Snyder calls “a communion,” “a face-to-face encounter with nature with body, mind, and spirit.” Writing affords one the opportunity to articulate this face-to-face encounter. Our approach then will be two-fold: one, a hands-on engagement with the multifaceted characteristics of nature; and two: the task of the writing itself. Through investigations into techniques and styles of nature writing, the student will be applying examples culled from the rich field of nature writers in America today: Peter Mathiessen, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and others.
Burt Bradley bio: He was a Lewis Mumford fellow at SUNY-Stony Brook. His poetry and fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Michigan Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region, and the recently published anthology Wyoming Fence Lines. His honors and awards include the Loft National Competition for Fiction, a Partners of the Americas exchange with Brazil where a book of his poems and prose, Traduzindo Goas/Translating Goias, was published in 2000, an Individual Artist Grant from the Wyoming Arts Council, two Ucross residencies, and a residency at Devils Tower National Monument. He is an associate professor of English at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, where he teaches "Writing in the Wild" courses in Yellowstone National Park and the canyonlands of the Southwest.
FMI: http://www.billingsymca.org/ and click on Writer’s Voice link.
