Writing Workshop with Amy Irvine

Join three Utah and Colorado writers in celebration of our beloved and contentious landscapes. Debut author and award-winning journalist Zak Podmore and seasoned writers Amy Irvine and Craig Childs talk red rock, rivers, and the joy of writing in and of the desert.

Craig Childs is the critically-acclaimed Colorado author of numerous books including The Secret Knowledge of Water. His latest book Virga & Bone: Essays from Dry Places focuses upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced—and delves into the primacy of our starkest landscapes and the profound nature of the more-than-human.

Zak Podmore is an award-winning Utah writer who reports for The Salt Lake Tribune and is the editor of the Canyon Echo. His new book Confluence: Navigating the Personal & Political on Rivers of the New West travels down the West’s most iconic wilderness rivers, from the Colorado to the Rio Grande. Part travelogue and part inquiry into environmental ethics, he presents an up-close, personal perspective on our responsibility to rivers and to each other.

Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn living off the grid in Colorado and is the author of Trespass. Her latest book Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness imagines a conversation with the late Edward Abbey, admiring his impact on her life while challenging the “lone male” narrative—white and privileged as it is—that still has its boots planted firmly at the center of today’s wilderness movement.

This event is free and open to the public. This event is presented by Back of Beyond Books and Torrey House Press, and it is supported in part by the Utah Humanities Center for the Book and Utah Division of Arts & Museums, with funding from the State of Utah and National Endowment for the Arts.