Mountain Words Festival in Colorado: expand your territory as a creative

As a writer and poet, balancing the creative and business sides of our existence is a shared challenge. We call the actions of being engaged in the literary community being a "literary citizen". These actions include going to readings and open mics, supporting authors, buying their books, visiting our independent bookstores. Our arts community in Truckee and Nevada County has been blossoming over the last ten years. The third Tahoe Literary Festival is October 9-10 this year and draws writers and participants from Tahoe, Sacramento, San Francisco, LA, across Nevada, and beyond to the East Coast this year. I recommend extending your territory as a writer and looking beyond our own region to find events that open you to new inspirations.

The Mountain Words Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, is a four day gathering "for writers, readers, and life-long learners" and this year Terry Tempest Williams, one of my favorite writers, presented as keynote for the festival. I've attended almost every year and this year was special because I was honored to participate as a presenting writer. I love that their tagline mentions readers and life-long learners. This festival offers much for everyone. Thank you to photographer Manuel Aragon @spacejunc  for the photos!

 Here's a little something of what I learned:

Arvin, owner of Townie Books, novelist and organizer/networker and visionary, is the brains and the brawn behind this festival!

Thursday May 21, the opening evening hosts an art gallery opening and the film showing of Andrea Gibson, the Colorado Poet Laureate who passed from cancer, sharing her journey through poems and film. Not a dry eye in the house. one take away from Gibson in the film: "Don't try harder; try softer."

Friday May 22, I began the morning early with a generative poetry workshop led by poet Wendy Videlock. "The world is a place of soul-making," she began. She quickly pushed the room of open minds to begin experimenting with language on the page. "Trust language and what it may do on its own." You can find her beautiful poems here and info on her insightful books. 

Poet Rajiv Mohabir presented the next poetry workshop that he titled "On Jumpstarting the Associative Mind" We got jumpstarted! Rajiv spoke to the paradox present in our lives and how this parallels the paradox in a poem. "We are living in a world of incredible beauty; we are living in a world of shock and horror." This is actually the reason to include the outside world in our poems, he said. In his workshop he offered approaches and tools for connecting our own lives with the facts and truths of the world around us. "Poems are not written until the moment of revision happens." He opened our writing process to an associative magic. 

Later that afternoon, I presented my generative poetry workshop "Writing Poems of Imagination and Resistance: Responding to current events" to a roomful of writers of all ages, interests, and genres. Through the big windows we could watch ravens above the town park and clouds gather behind the mountain peaks of Paradise Divide. I was thrilled to be joined by some of my oldest friends in Crested Butte this afternoon. This quote from Martin Espada inspired my approach to prioritizing imagination in these poems that can touch on the political: 

“I see the poetic imagination as essential to the political poem. For poetry, truth is necessary but not sufficient. The imagination you cite in your question—that imagined afterlife, that imagined justice—goes to the heart of the poem as vision. William Blake wrote: “What is now proved was once only imagined.” We must imagine justice, even the impossible, even if this requires leaps that some might call surreal.”

Saturday May 23 began with a wonderful workshop led by Brooke Williams, writer and walker, a re-enchantment and a meditative walk to Totem Pole Park by the Coal Creek. He led us through a visualization tapping into the collective unconscious for allowing our mind to let go, to learn from dreams and their imagery, and to warm laughter. He shared his own path of learning leading through Robert Johnson, Inner Work Dreams, Environmental storytelling at Colby College, Imaginal Ecology (with links back to Mundis Imaginalis in the 8th century) and the innate intelligence explored in Jungian studies. His assignment on our walk was to notice and write about what flirts with you?

In the afternoon Terry Tempest Williams, writer, activist, teacher, presented two conversations, the first around the writing of her most recent book The Glorians, visitations from the holy ordinary. She was interviewed by Ben Goldfarb, author of How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet.  She is currently teaching at Harvard Divinity School. Have you read Refuge, or Hour of the Land, or When Women were Birds by Tempest? go read her! As an environmental writer, Terry spoke about how the students at HDS experience climate change and collapse as a spiritual problem. She spoke about wanting a more spiritual life, about asking herself what is the vow I've forgotten, and finding a mission in this current book. A glorian she said "is an encounter when our attention is focused and nothing else exists, an encounter unannounced, unexpected, unearned, a moment of grace." Our best teachers, she said, are the land, birds, rivers, Nature, and the West.

In her next conversation,  Terry spoke with Nina McConigley, author, playwright and professor who wrote a fan letter to Terry as a 15 year old high school student. They struck up a pen pal relationship that has continued into a long friendship as writers. They spoke about questions such as, how do we renew? how do we have silence, how do we not be distracted in a culture of distraction? She recommended Pico Iyer's book Flame, and said that retreat can mean gather ourselves. And as humans beings engaged in the world, "How can we not respond? Each of us responds in our own way." The room was tearful and wonder-filled.

Sunday May 24 opened with a generative poetry workshop led by the dynamic poet Suzy Q Smith, artist and music maker, titled "Intertextuality". Writing into an absence or erasure of another text, inviting or continuing a conversation with another text, possibly bringing something new that wasn't there originally. In this process, Suzy Q encouraged us to find for ourselves what is at stake personally, why are we writing about this now and what does it matter to us? What is your relationship with this subject?

After her workshop, a poetry reading in the Atrium with Suzy Q, Wendy Videlock, Erica Reid (Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO), and myself. This was possibly my highlight of the festival, to meet and read my poems with these other poets. In Round Robin style, we chose to read a poem that responded to the poem read just before, one after another. We surprised each other with our poems and that led to some candid and organic craft discussions between poems. Thank you Suzi, Erica, and Wendy for your inspiration!