Torrey House Press announces Voices for the West: Writing Workshops February 14 - February 16, 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: $800
• Early Bird Pricing: $700 - 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, 2026. Cancel by January 1, 2027, for a 50% refund. No refunds will be given after January 1, 2027.

Workshop Descriptions:

NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH AMY IRVINE 

The “Me” in Memoir: How to Write a Story That is Both Personal and Panoramic

This workshop is suitable for any level of writer, and any sort of nonfiction in which the writer’s personal POV and experience are included. In this workshop, we’ll explore examples of writing in which larger stories exert influence on the author’s experience, and how different writers connect the two on the page. Together we’ll learn to consider the context as a kind of character that the narrator must reckon with; even the most personal story cannot occur in a vacuum. Ecosystem. Family. Culture. And the ancestral origins--those who came before. We’ll map these stories as concentric rings that encircle our own; some are larger, more abstract (think watershed or patriarchy) and some are quite tangible (the dwindling Great Salt Lake or the bear who crashed the family picnic in Millcreek Canyon). We’ll learn how to explore and marble this contextual information into our writing, we’ll play with moving intuitively in and out of the story that focuses on “I” to the wider, more universal story of “Us.” This move protects the story from reading as mere navel-gazing, as memoirs and personal narratives can be accused of. Weaving our story into a larger social and environmental fabric also allows more people to connect with it--and isn’t that what most storytellers desire? To reach as large an audience as possible?

NONFICTION WORKSHOP WITH DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA

Unearthing Your Voice: A Workshop to Contact your Wild and Fertile Heart

Recording the ground requires sensitive gear designed to isolate faint low-frequency rumbles. Healthy soil sings, my ancestors asserted for millennia, and now scientists too have confirmed the earth’s song. Contact microphones detect earthworms and beetles, a soundtrack of crackles lifting from the land. Though it may be hard for us to hear, we know it is vital, for the earth’s recorded music reveals her fertility, stamina, and strength.

We too have music ticking in our bodies, recorded over a lifetime, embedded in bones and muscle, emitting from our fascia, making us well or sick. Sometimes we lose contact with our innermost longing, the stories we need to heal. Many of us feel overwhelmed by violence against the land, and too often the endangerment of the earth contributes to the loss of our creative nature. Overbuilt and excavated, our intuition, like the earth, can be fragile. The beauty of the natural world has been looted, and as it fades so dies the movement of our inner dreams.

But the storyteller fights back. To write, we must separate the world’s brassy clangs from the music of our lives. Much has been written about second sight, a way of knowing that extends beyond regular vision. In this workshop, we will use prompts designed to unearth a second set of ears. We will point contact microphones toward our body’s soil, connecting with our deepest memories and wisdom. In this way, I will encourage you to hear your histories, your creaking limbs, your hopeful heart. To seize the vitality of dreamers and storytellers, you must strain to hear the stories only you can tell. My job is to facilitate that listening.

POETRY WORKSHOP WITH JAKE SKEETS 

Field Notes, Circuits, Waters, Rooms, Wind

This workshop will focus on writing place as a Living System. We will approach place not as just as scenery but as a living system often shaped by language, memory, force, and attention. Poetry often registers the conditions of that system: bureaucratic structures, perceptual circuitry, flowing processes, domestic ecologies, and atmospheric pressures. We will examine how inherited language structures perception, often administrative, urban, and institutional. We will slow things down and interrogate the systems embedded in the pastoral. We will ask: What language followed us here? What language governs how we see?

FICTION WORKSHOP WITH PAM HOUSTON 

Writing With the Help of the More Than Human World

This will be a generative workshop which focuses on following our senses (sight, sound smell touch taste) to the metaphors (hunks of the physical world) that most resonate with us, and then following them to the stories we have to tell. This is how I have always written, and that may be true for some of you too. This may be because I trust the physical world to give me the story ingredients I need, and I also trust my intuition to know when I am in the presence of one of those hunks of the physical world that has the chance to become a major story component, that may well reveal the secret and profound parts of my story to me. As opposed to thinking a story through in my head, and then finding hunks of the physical world to populate it with. While that sounds logical, it feels backwards to me, and it puts my analytical brain too much in charge of the story, when I want to lead, at least in first draft, with my intuition and my heart. I believe I have a much better chance of telling a truer story if I do it this way. A story that is truer to me, and a story that bears witness to the Earth and all her particularities (white fir, roan horse, kingfisher, riverbank, etc) because I love Her so much, and know that every story I have ever told comes from Her.

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 the night sky that stretches from wall to wall above the canyon, others may use the colors of the canyons to imagine a future world or a past one, others might hear your ancestors, or even your most obnoxious ex-boyfriend, offering up dialogue in the riffles of the Virgin River. 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.

Recommend (but not require) books as pre-course reading: The Lost Journals of Sacajawea by Debra Earling, Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigley, and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko.

For fiction, short story collections, and essay collections, please submit full manuscripts. For narrative nonfiction, please submit a query first and a full proposal upon request. Please note we only accept manuscripts and proposals via Submittable. 

The review process for submissions can take 3-4 months, or longer in some instances. We understand what it’s like to await a response, and we appreciate your patience. Phone calls, emails, or letters of inquiry will not hasten the process.

FICTION | FULL MANUSCRIPT GUIDELINES

Along with your manuscript, please include a single Word document with the following information:

• A one- or two-paragraph overview of your book
• A detailed, beginning-to-end synopsis (i.e. all critical information about plot mechanics, character arcs, and the reader's experience of the story) 
• How your submission fits with the mission and values of Torrey House Press
• Biographical material, plus anything else we should know about your background, expertise, network, public profile, etc. 
• Marketing and readership development information: specific target audience(s), comparable titles that illustrate the reader’s experience of your manuscript; any special publicity/sales potential; book tour/event prospects where attendees will be interested in you as a speaker, etc.       

NARRATIVE NONFICTION | QUERY GUIDELINES

Please submit a one- or two-page overview of your book idea along with information about yourself, why you are qualified to write on the subject, who your audience is, and how you propose to market your work. If we think there is a reasonable chance that we might pursue your book, we will request a full proposal.

NARRATIVE NONFICTION | FULL PROPOSAL GUIDELINES (UPON REQUEST)

At least three completed sample chapters are required for proposal consideration; full manuscript strongly preferred.

In addition to your manuscript/sample chapters, please submit the following items in a single Word document:

• Cover letter
• Resume
• Preliminary table of contents
• A one- or two-paragraph summary of each chapter
• Marketing research such as: specific target audience(s); descriptions of other books on the same or similar topic and an explanation of why your book is different; any special publicity/sales potential; book tour/event prospects where attendees will be interested in you as a speaker 
• Biographical material, expanded from that in the query letter

Thank you for your interest in Torrey House Press.