Upcoming Retreats and Workshops
Ranchlands Summer Poetry Retreat (SOLD OUT)
Joint waitlist by emailing stay@ranchlands.com to be added.
July 21 – 28, 2024
The Program
Every day will begin with a half-day horseback ride, taking in the epic landscape of the San Luis Valley. On these expansive rides, we’ll have room to spread out, roaming through bison herds and poeming in cottonwood groves. We’ll explore the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and Zapata Falls, breaking for a picnic lunch, writing, and discussion.
The afternoons will be dedicated to generative workshops, formative mentorship and writing time. Inspired by the lush landscape, craft workshops will focus on creating evocative imagery, writing the weird, risky, and wild, and learning to season a sentence with both flavor and texture.
Every evening, we’ll gather again under a star-studded sky and enjoy dinner designed with local ingredients, then circle around the fire pit to chat creativity and slow, chewy art.
All riding and writing levels welcome. This workshop is specifically intended for those desiring to reconnect to the sacredness of horses, wild spaces, and of the self.
November Sustenance Workshop W/ Poet Danusha Laméris
Title: Writing Into the Unknown
Wednesday, November 15th, 5 - 6:30pm PST
$40 (limited outside tickets available, free to Sustenance members)
Writing is a way of knowing. It asks us to examine memory, certainty, and the possibility of revelation. In this workshop, we'll explore how to use the pivots of gesture to complicate our work, layer certainty with uncertainty, knowing with not-knowing.
Let's learn how to engage ourselves and our readers by unraveling what we've just said, asking a question, correcting ourselves. All right there on the page. You'll see how this brings work to life and can lead us to our own epiphanies. While I will be sharing sample work from poems, this can be applied to poetry and prose. We'll have time for a writing prompt as well as a Q and A.
As the days darken, let's delve into the rich darkness of the unknown together.
December Sustenance Workshop w/ Poet Ellen Bass
Title: The Image: The Heart of the Poem
Tuesday, December 12th , 5 - 6:30pm PST
$45 (limited outside tickets available, free to Sustenance members)
Join us for a special Sustenance craft talk with legendary Ellen Bass. We'll have a class on image, followed by a time of Q+A.
The image is the heart of the poem. Ezra Pound defined it as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” That instant is when we take in the physical world and give back our response. It’s also our greatest opportunity to connect, to deliver the physical, sensory world so vividly that the reader experiences something new. The image is the opposite of the explanation. It operates beyond argument, beyond reason. In that way it’s like falling in love. In this craft class, we'll focus on images in exemplary poems and learn how to make our poems come alive with what Tony Hoagland calls “thingitude.”