Mountain Words Festival 2026

Mapping the Inner Landscape of Your Work
We often talk about what we write, but rarely where it comes from. How do our identities, histories, and personal values come together to form the lens or prism through which our words appear? In this session, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen shares a cartographic approach to understanding our own creative ecosystems. Participants will be guided through a reflective inquiry before creating their own visual process maps, charting the unseen forces that shape not just our artistic voices, but our lives as creators.

Join short fiction writer and novelist Claire Boyles in a workshop to stimulate your creative process.

Beyond the Forest and the Trees: Layers of Landscape and Place

The author Robert Macfarlane writes: “The best of the recent [nature] writing is ethically alert, theoretically literate and wary of the seductions and corruptions of the pastoral. It is sensitive to the dark histories of landscapes and to the structures of ownership and capital that organise – though do not wholly produce – our relations with the natural world.”  To capture this complexity of place, writers must describe the immediate sensory experience of the story (the trees) and the way those physical details operate on character and story tension (the forest). They must also portray, to some degree, the historical and political contexts surrounding both (the atmosphere). In exploring these layers of landscape and place, writers will learn techniques for widening the scope of their work.

Finding the Magic and the Soul of Poetry with Wendy Videlock

In this generative workshop we will discover a variety of delightful techniques to hush our inner critics and rediscover poetry as fundamentally fun — as well as illuminating. We will approach the poem as an open invitation and will begin to understand how musicality is key to opening the subconscious and cultivating our own unique voices. We will find new ways to understand three important poetic devices and how they work to free the imagination and render language limber. Participants will write poems from prompts that wake up our relationship to language, landscape and the imagination. Those who wish to share with the class will be given opportunity to do so and Wendy will provide individual feedback to anybody who would like it. For all skill levels. Please bring a notebook, a pen and an open mind.

In this two-part seminar, geared for both novelists and memoirists, writing coaches Dan Manzanares and Doug Kurtz will use spontaneous ideas from workshop attendees to create a story any agent would drool to read. We'll activate the Story Map, a relational storytelling model, to show the group in real time how a story works and how easy it is to go from first concept to full draft.

This generative session with poet Rajiv Mohabir (Whale Aria, Antiman, I Will Not Go) is a must-do for nature writers.

Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry that have been awarded gold in Forward Indies and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Join seasoned literary podcasted Mitzi Rapkin for a talk with author of the New York Times bestseller book Poster Child, The Still Point of the Turning World, Sanctuary, and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. Her new book, I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling is an anti-ablest, feminist book about creativity, one that grapples with how to cultivate a vibrant and joyful life from hard experiences and grief. Emily describes it herself: "It's like Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act for very sad, super smart people."

For her entire life, Emily has been answering questions in elevators: what’s wrong with you? What happened to your body? (Emily lost her leg when she was a child, which she writes about in her 2021 memoir Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg) and, in the case of her son’s terminal illness and death, she’s been told more times than she can count: “I would die if I were you.” But, as Emily says, she is alive—and lived—precisely because she learned how to frame and write about some of the most difficult stories a person can live through, alchemizing pain into truth and meaning.

As someone who writes and teaches books about loss and grief, two very loaded and universal subjects, Black wanted to write a book that would empower readers with “conversation stopping” stories to tell their stories in a way that can be healing for those who may have been forced to live a similar story.

Based on two decades of teaching a wide range of students with diverse and difficult experiences, I Would Die If I Were You is a book for people who have ever felt like their story was “too sad” to tell, or didn’t want to tell their story because the emotional burden of the response of the listener was its own kind of traumatic event. It's a book for readers of George Saunders, Melissa Febos, and Lidia Yuknavitch—writers of those special kinds of craft books that go well beyond discussing writing and creativity to explore broader subjects like friendship, love, loss, parenting, the body, and more.

In this two-part seminar, geared for both novelists and memoirists, writing coaches Dan Manzanares and Doug Kurtz will use spontaneous ideas from workshop attendees to create a story any agent would drool to read. We'll activate the Story Map, a relational storytelling model, to show the group in real time how a story works and how easy it is to go from first concept to full draft.

Modern readers want to immerse themselves in your story, to feel what the characters see and feel. This class will extend the common exhortation of “show, don’t tell” to the idea of “inside/outside.” Learn how to bring your reader into the world and emotions of the characters. Come prepared to write.

Join writer River Selby for a session on writing memoir. Selby is the author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire. Selby was a wildland firefighter whose given name was Anastasia. This is a memoir of that time in their life—of Ana, the struggles she encountered, and the constraints of what it means to be female-bodied in a male-dominated industry. An illuminating debut from a fierce new voice, Hotshot is a timely reckoning with both the personal and environmental dangers of wildland firefighting.

Zooming in and Out in Memoir-

Writing a memoir can be overwhelming, especially if one story is emotionally charged (and it often is). In this generative workshop, River Selby, author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire, a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2025, will help writers identify a particular scene, zoom in, and then reflect on the elements surrounding that scene in a way that illuminates the material for both writers and readers. Bring a seed of a scene into the workshop– anything works; and expect to leave inspired and ready to continue writing.

Poet Michael Hettich, with decades of experience with writing and reading poetry leads this generative workshop for poets of all levels.

One of the fallacies all writers hear at some point is that one should “write what you know.” Infact, the thrill of writing poetry lies in discovering what one does not know, or, more accurately,what one does not know one knows. Thus, the successful poem is one that surprises the poetherself with its discovered truth—or even, in extremely rare moments, with its revelation. In thisshort workshop, I will present some basic approaches to the practice of writing poetry that allowthe writer to use cadence and image as a vehicle for exploration and discovery. We will write inresponse to various prompts and share what comes our way, and I will share advice for how tointegrate a regular and productive poetic practice into our busy lives.

John Hausdoerffer, author of the collection, How to Be a Good Ancestor, leads this session giving storytellers the depth and persepective to tell better stories.

Debut novelists Nina McConigley (How to Commit a Post Colonial Murder) and Claire Boyles (Appraisals) discuss the road to publication. 

“Poetry has the intangible, almost inexplicable power to make something happen, to move people, to console the inconsolable.” – Martin Espada

“The challenges of the form ask us to move past our first impulses, to attend to aspects of poem we might otherwise ignore, to invite surprise, and to allow meaning to grow organically”–Maggie Queeney

How can we call on the tools of imagination and resistance in our writing to strengthen our voice and agency on the page and in our lives? In this generative writing workshop, we’ll read poems by poets we admire that integrate social/ public experience with the personal. The first part of this workshop explores the craft of powerful narrative and lyric poems that take on charged events. How does the poet enter the subject matter? How are poetic elements incorporated, such as voice, image, and form? We will consider choices the poet makes such as who is the audience, who is the speaker, and what is the conceit? With the poems as models and using provocative prompts, we’ll draft one or two new poems. You’ll leave with new poems and fresh techniques for how to handle challenging material.

Mountain Words partner and sponson, Crested Butte Magazine, will release their newest edition with fun and fanfare. Join Mountain Words Founder and now editor of the CB Magazine, Brooke Macmillan along with the contributors of this year's summer magazine for a drink and camaraderie. Mountain Words presenter Claire Boyles, a Crested Butte Mountain Words Writer in Residence will be there to celebrate her piece with the complement of long time writers for the magazine. 

Join readers from all over Gunnison County in celebrating David Baron's American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. American Eclipse by is about the 1878 total solar eclipse that crossed the American West, focusing on the race between scientists like Thomas Edison, Maria Mitchell, and James Craig Watson to study it, revealing America's rise as a scientific power during the Gilded Age. The book blends scientific history with adventure, covering the challenges of the era, including train robberies and the frontier setting, to tell the story of this significant astronomical event.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT IS AT THE GUNNISON BRANCH LIBRARY

Why do so many persistent myths, superstitions, and folk beliefs arise? Why does our social brain love stories that feel true over facts that are true? Shane’s newest show explores how the weirdest, funniest misunderstandings in human history come from our very human minds.
Expect to laugh and learn in equal measure as we explore:

• Cartoonishly bad ideas that stuck around for centuries
• How cognitive biases and social instincts drive our love of myth and lore
• Why modern misinformation feels so compelling

It’s part aha, part haha, and all about celebrating curiosity and the pursuit of understanding.