Pam HoustonWriting Deep Into Winter’s Embrace

February 12 - 17, 2023 Go back
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This retreat is perfect for those who want to get a jumpstart on their writing, or have an old project to reinvigorate. Mornings will be spent in class talking writing, talking about contemporary essays and stories, getting started on daily writing assignments. Afternoons are for writing and/or for fun in the snow. Some evenings we will share work in the retreat center after dinner. The snow and the cold and the lake and the forest will remind us we are still alive. 

This retreat is open to all levels of writers. 

Check In: February 12, 2023
Check Out: February 17, 2023

Tuition + Meals: $1,200
With TreeHaus Lodging Package: $1,905
With RicePod Lodging Package: $2,333
With Nest Lodging Package: $2,655

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  • Class description
  • Bio
  • Supply List
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Class description

I love being on the shores of Lake Superior in the short and beautiful days of winter as much as I love anywhere on earth. Why? Because it reminds me of the essential balances in life and in art making. The way being willing to walk into the darkness always—and I mean always—gives us access to the light. This workshop will be a combination of generating new work and reading and critiquing short samples (no more than five pages, double spaced, and if you don’t have five pages, don’t worry, you will make them when we are together!). We will also avail ourselves of the sublime beauty around us, getting out in the snow for a couple hours daily, for a walk, a hike to the ice caves, a x-country ski, a writing session out on the surface of the frozen lake. (So bring your snow pants!!).  Students who give themselves fully to this experience will leave Wild Rice with the following:

THREE THINGS RETREAT GUESTS WILL WALK AWAY WITH UPON RETREAT COMPLETION:

  • 5-8 new pieces of writing, either complete in themselves or starts for something longer
  • Ideas about how to lean into their strengths as writers and how to adjust things that need attention
  • A deep sense of relationship between the physical, natural world and the art making process, how the physical world gives us all the tools we need to make our very best art.man beings

biography

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award and more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Contents May Have Shifted, and four other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton.

She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches creative writing at UC Davis and at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and fiction editor at the Environmental Arts Journal Terrain.org. She raises Icelandic Sheep and Irish Wolfhounds and is a fierce advocate for the Earth.

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Supply List

  • Laptop and/or writing materials
  • Clothes for outdoor play