Mountain Words Festival 2026

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Author and editor Rakesh Satyal discusses the author-editor relationship and process with festival director, Arvin Ram. This will be an excellent opportunity for all writers to understand what happens to a manuscript once it goes from the agent phase, to the publisher phase of its life. 

Satyal is the author of the novels Blue Boy and No One Can Pronounce My Name. Blue Boy won a Lambda Literary Award, the Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was adapted into an award-winning short film by the actor-writer-director Nik Dodani, who is currently developing it into a feature film. No One Can Pronounce My Name was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Satyal is currently an Executive Editor at the HarperOne Group/HarperCollins and currently sits on the advisor council for Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn.

When plans shift, the conversation deepens. Join acclaimed Colorado authors Claire Boyles and Shelley Read for an inside look at the author-agent relationship — from finding representation to navigating the publishing world — in an honest, engaging literary discussion.

Megan Kate-Nelson and Garrett Peck discuss the intricacies of research and how to create evocative characterizations of historical figures. 

For passholders, this is a very intimate conversation between Terry Tempest Williams and Nina McConigley about her life in art and words in the natural world

Join acclaimed author Benjamin Percy to learn how contemporary writers engage plot, character, dialogue, and suspense. Percy's book, Thrill Me, is an urgent and entertaining book on craft that brims with Percy's distinctive blend of anecdotes and advice, all in the service of one dictum: thrill the reader.

Take your Pantsing and Planning to the next level and become a Mapper instead. In this two-part seminar, writing coaches Doug Kurtz and Dan Manzanares will introduce you to the Story Map, their breakthrough tool that helps memoirists of all stripes and skill levels unlock the potential of their books. Part 1, Orientation, is an introduction to the Story Map and how to use it, followed by an open Q&A session. Part 2, Implementation, is a hands-on workshop in which participants will explore the holistic landscape of Story that underlies craft and begin the Story Mapping process. Memoirists at any stage of the writing process are welcome.

Take your Pantsing and Planning to the next level and become a Mapper instead. In this two-part seminar, writing coaches Doug Kurtz and Dan Manzanares will introduce you to the Story Map, their breakthrough tool that helps memoirists of all stripes and skill levels unlock the potential of their books. Part 1, Orientation, is an introduction to the Story Map and how to use it, followed by an open Q&A session. Part 2, Implementation, is a hands-on workshop in which participants will explore the holistic landscape of Story that underlies craft and begin the Story Mapping process. Memoirists at any stage of the writing process are welcome.

Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page is about staying in love with your writing: feeling excited, mischievous, productive, and hopeful—the opposite of being stuck.

Critically acclaimed, award-winning author and beloved teacher Ramona Ausubel offers 101 exercises that promise to welcome you back to the page again and again; to reinvigorate your process and help you see your writing through to the end. Full of personal stories and hard-earned wisdom of a veteran writer, Unstuck is written in the first person, human to human, writer to writer. Practical, clear, and welcoming, Unstuck offers immediately useable strategies for beginning, continuing, and finishing a piece of writing.

Organized into doorways and keys, Unstuck turns problems into possibilities, offers keys to put into use right now, all designed to lead the writer back to the art, not toward an outside idea or formula. With Ausubel’s steady, encouraging advice—find your doorway, unlock the lock, and get writing again.


Ramona Ausubel’s fifth book, The Last Animal was a national bestseller, a Barnes & Noble book of the month and named a best book of 2023 by NPR, Kirkus and the Oprah quarterly. Her previous books are Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder with her family

Fiction workshop with Nina McConigley