Unsure of which experience is right for you? learn more
In this class writers will let the beauty and wisdom of the natural world support us in writing a series of generative exercises and conversations about craft.
This retreat is open to all levels of writers.
Check In: February 7, 2027 - 4 pm
Check Out: February 12, 2027 - 1 pm
Tuition + Meals: $1,730
With TreeHaus Twin Lodging Package: $2,675
With TreeHaus Queen Lodging Package: $2,725
With RicePod Twin Lodging Package: $2,925
With RicePod Queen Lodging Package: $3,075
With Nest Lodging Package: $3,225
This is a Wild Rice Retreat–hosted retreat, part of our thoughtfully curated programming. We proudly partner with skilled retreat leaders to bring guided experiences to our resort—designed to inspire, nourish, and support personal growth in alignment with our mission.
- Class description
- Bio
- Supply List
- gallery
Class description
There is something about the clarity of winter, the crisp air, the colors of the ice, the tree limbs heaped with snow, that generates all kinds of stories inside me that want to be told. It is my firm belief that the Earth and all her riches (trees, snow, lakes, caves, deer, sky, blizzards, so much more) are standing by, ready to help us through the tough times we are living in, ready to offer solace and metaphor and story.
First she awes us with her beauty, then unlocks the doors to our memories, and then provides the metaphors we need to tell our stories. We will spend half our time together outside (hiking to the ice caves, walking on the lake, x-country skiing or snowshoeing, maybe even visiting some horses!) and the other half in the beautiful peace pod, making stories.
Students who give themselves fully to this experience will leave Wild Rice with the following:
- 5-8 new pieces of writing, either complete in themselves or starts for something longer.
- A reclamation of joy, which will become the fuel for our endurance.
- 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
- An awareness of their strengths as writers as well as areas to work on, and a solidified vocabulary for talking about craft.
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.
| Website: | Follow: |
|---|---|
| pamhouston.net | Instagram | Facebook |
Supply List
- Laptop and/or writing materials
- Clothes for outdoor play
