Voices for the West 2026 Writing Workshops
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Torrey House Press announces Voices for the West: Writing Workshops February 27 - March 1, 2026
Generate new work, take risks, and learn from award-winning instructors and fellow writers in a supportive and intimate space surrounded by the stunning redrock scenery of Springdale, Utah, and Zion National Park. The workshop will run two and a half days, starting Friday morning and closing early afternoon on Sunday. In addition to working with our terrific faculty, we'll be offering our Publishing 101 presentation by Torrey House Press Co-Executive Directors to learn the ins and outs of the industry. Light breakfasts will be supplied all three days with lunches on Friday and Saturday. Writers of all levels are welcome.
Hone your craft at writing workshops during the day, and enjoy public events and readings with the award-winning instructors in the evenings. Each workshop will have a maximum of 15 attendees. A limited number of scholarships will be awarded to attendees on the basis of financial need. Please specify in your submission whether or not you would like to apply for a scholarship and a scholarship form will be emailed to you.
To apply:
Please submit a writing sample of 1,000-2,500 words (if applying for fiction or nonfiction workshop) or three poems (if applying for poetry workshop) in a single Word document. Please name the file with your last name and the writing track you are applying for (i.e.: Lastname_Poetry). Your application will be reviewed within a few days and you will be notified via email.
TUITION:
- Workshop Pricing: $750
- Early Bird Pricing: $675 - pay tuition within 30 days of application; expires September 15
If you need to cancel for any reason, you may request a full refund of your tuition payment by December 1, 2025. Cancel by January 1, 2026, for a 50% refund. No refunds will be given after January 1, 2026.
Workshop Descriptions:
NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH AMY IRVINE
How to Set Scenes Ablaze
Human instinct is to contain what burns so it can't get too big, or generate too much force—which is good advice when building a campfire in the arid West. But on the page, our goal is to let the scene blaze across topographical highs and lows—to help it create its own weather. Through language, embodiment and immediacy, we'll learn to write scenes as if they were fevered acts in a Shakespearean play, or heated moments in a Jane Campion film. In other words, we will dramatize the overstory—the forest canopy where a wildfire is a spectacle. But we will also root around in the understory—the part of the fire that burns out of sight--the place from which an unseeable, emotional heat rises and adds velocity.
This generative writing workshop welcomes both fiction and nonfiction writers; we'll be creating scenes from scratch through guided exercises and live scene enactments. The format works well for experienced writers but also works for those with more basic skills—all that's needed is a sense of adventure! Together we'll learn how to identify, gather and pile tinder: the specific, exquisite details that make a scene throw sparks. We'll learn how to coax flames from even a common and mild moment, say, watching a raven wing its way between canyon walls, so it ignites the reader's senses. As weather permits, we'll work outside. And we'll move our bodies (to the extent that you are comfortable and/or able to), in and out of the scenes that we create and jump in and out of--which brings the scene alive in a way that almost always blows the writer's mind. This fun and unique process helps writers create moments that put off enough heat to stay with readers long after the flames are doused.
NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH CRAIG CHILDS
Let the World Carry You
Writing can be limited because it comes from inside your head, an object slightly larger than a bowling ball and weighing about the same. It becomes an echo chamber sometimes, sentence after sentence sounding identical. This workshop will help free your mind and free your pen. We will be writing with a variety of prompts and in different environments to get out of ourselves and into what surrounds us. Come with something to write with and on, laptops allowed if that’s your tool of choice. Everyone please bring old school pen and paper for certain assignments. We will be inside and outside. No advanced prep is needed, just show up with your usual headful of stories and we will open it up from there.
POETRY WORKSHOP WITH JAKE SKEETS
Poetry from Land and People
Poems are alive and speak to us. Poems are spirit. Poems are transformative. Our poetry workshop will use student workshop application samples and selected poems written by established poets as a way to learn from individual work and improve writing. In a supportive, creative environment, you will have time to write, revise, and share poems. You’re invited to attend whether you’re an established or beginning poet.
FICTION WORKSHOP WITH PAM HOUSTON
Writing With the Help of the More Than Human World
This is a generative workshop open to all levels of writers who are interested in investigating the more than human world, both for its own sake and also to help open doors to the hidden human worlds inside of each of us. By “more than human world,” I mean animals, fish, plants, geologic formations, desert, mountain, sky (I could go on) as well as realities that may exist parallel to the realities the dominant culture takes for granted. In this class we will contemplate ourselves as creatures. We will consider models of thinking (practiced historically and currently by Indigenous cultures) of ourselves in relation to the nonhuman beings on this planet that may not have led so inevitably to climate collapse and fascistic uprising (just to name two things). We will consider why the same machine that wants to kill wolf puppies and bear cubs in their dens also wants to deny women, and queer and trans people bodily autonomy. We will consider the problematic nature of the word anthropomorphize, of consistently assigning little or no "intelligence" to beings we wish to oppress. We will imagine living within a system where the inherent and ancient knowledge of plants and animals was revered rather than ignored, a world in which more humans learned how to listen. We will listen to the desert together.
We will spend some of our class time each day out in the desert, walking, sitting, writing, noticing, listening. I will offer a series of exercises to be done in and out of the classroom that are designed to help writers get out of their own way, to get out of their logic and into their intuition, and I will use the flora and the fauna and beauty of the desert to help me. Some of you may write deeply into a pinon tree, others may use your discovery a flake of ancient pottery to unlock the story of your divorce. The point is not necessarily to write about the desert, but to ask for the desert’s assistance in writing whatever it is you most need to write. After people sign up, I will send an optional pre-course reading list. I so look forward to being with you and these other fine writers and the Torrey House crew.