La Serrania: Writing Between Life and Fiction, Pam Houston

My goal as workshop leader is to create an environment where beginning and seasoned writers become excited about taking both stylistic and emotional risks with their work.

We will begin with exercises that will set the theme for the week: the way we take the details from the physical world that resonate for us and translate them into words and paragraphs that will help us access the beautiful and frightening stories we have to tell.

Allowing the physical landscape of a story to stand in and represent our emotional landscapes, I believe, is the most essential craft, the real artistry of fiction.

We will learn to trust the way the physical world gives us the tools (and, incidentally, the courage) to tell our most profound truths, and to write stories that will move our readers by activating not just their minds but their senses.

We will be aiming for stories in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. We will move from the exercises into students work-in-progress.

Students should bring approximately 20 pages of fiction to be workshopped, as well as something short to read out loud. They should also read The Best American Short Stories of the Century, Houghton Mifflin, John Updike, edt. so that we have a common base of stories as a frame of reference during workshops.

The most contemporary stories will be the most useful for us, so I recommend reading from the back of the book as far forward as Joyce Carol Oates.

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys are My Weakness (winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award, translated into nine languages) and Waltzing the Cat (winner of the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction.)

Her stories have been selected for The O.Henry Awards and The Pushcart Prize and her story The Best Girlfriend You Never Had was John Updike's only addition to Best American Short Stories of the Century when that volume was issued in paperback in 2000.

A collection of autobiographical essays, A Little More About Me, was published in the fall of 1999. Houston has edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction and poetry called Women on Hunting, and written the text for a book of photographs called Men Before Ten A.M.

Houston is a licensed river guide and a horsewoman. She is an Associate Professor in the writing program at U.C. Davis as well as at many summer writers' conferences and festivals in the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

To learn more about Pam Houston visit her website: www.pamhouston.net

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Read Pam Houston's Odyssey: 'Why I Write'

currently scheduled workshops
	spring 2008 Cooking, Walking & Massage Tai Chi, Mountain Walks & Massage Freefall Writing Writing Between Life & Fiction Mountain Walks & Massage Private Retreat: 'No Teacher, No Method Writing for Our Lives Yoga, Mountain Walks & Massage Yoga: Practicing a New Way of Being Sanctuary: Exploring Self in Writing & Art Power Yoga & Dance Workshop Spring Yoga Retreat Yoga & Cooking Workshop		summer 2008 Summer Retreat autumn 2008 Art & the Attentive Traveller Tai Chi, Mountain Walks & Reflexology