Goldenrod Resident Faculty
Lisa Densmore
Lisa Densmore: Book and magazine writer, television producer, photographer and Emmy-award winner. Densmore, from New Hampshire, has contributed hundreds of diverse articles for many publications, from Wyoming Wildlife to Backpacker. And she has taught numerous seminars and workshops, to better communicate her rich knowledge. This multi-talented, award-winning author will engage her students in the writing craft needed for creating various types of text-photo packages.
Course Topic: Creating a Text-Photo Package for Publication
This workshop teaches how to create a combination article and photo submission for publication in magazines, newspapers, e-zines and blogs. It will show writers how to add photography to their articles. Likewise, it will help photographers add prose to their images. Participants will undertake practical field work on simulated assignments. They will also learn what photographs work or don’t work for various editorial uses and how to take and submit images to support their article assignments. Classroom time will emphasize the key aspects of article writing, with a focus on developing a strong lede, compelling descriptive language, story flow, style and structure. During the workshop, students will put together text-photo packages for specific types of articles including a feature story, a how-to article, and a personal profile. We will look at a variety of outdoor, conservation and nature magazines, analyzing their tone and format. A substantial amount of time will be dedicated to the presentation and critique of student work. Students will also get tips on the business of outdoor communications and how to get published. Note: Students will need a laptop computer with Word and Photoshop (or similar photo processing software) and a digital camera for this workshop.
Alan Liere
Alan Liere, of Spokane, Washington, is an award-winning back-page columnist for half-dozen national magazines. He also contributes weekly columns to two newspapers. He graduated twice from Eastern Washington University – once with a BA in Education and again with an MFA in non-fiction writing. After teaching school for 30 years, Liere retired to his country home where he just finished his fourth book, a collection of outdoor humor. He is a member of Northwest Outdoor Writers’ Association and the Outdoor Writers Association of America.
Course Topic: Selling and reselling and reselling some more
To achieve this, we will cover the following:
- The evolution of a story
- Condensing and expanding the essay
- Capturing the audience and pleasing the editor with humor and dialogue
Jeff Hull
Jeff Hull has been a freelance magazine writer for more than 20 years, focusing on travel and outdoors writing. His work has taken him from Indonesia to Iceland, New Zealand to northern Saskatchewan, with dozens of stops in between. He has taught magazine writing in The University of Montana School of Journalism for the past ten years. He has also published short stories, the novel, “Pale Morning Done,” and a book of essays, “Streams of Consciousness.”
Course Topic: Travel Writing
The spaces of the natural world often resonate emotionally with our interior spaces. Whether you choose to write narratives of high adventure or quiet reflection—amusing or profound—your experiences traveling across the landscape can be rendered in a way that elevates them beyond mere travelogue. You can create stories with meaning. How do you sharpen writing about the world outside to distinguish it from chewing the scenery? Learn to bring telling details, character development, appropriate dialogue, narrative arc and critical thinking together to form meaningful stories that resonate with readers. You’ll study the craft of developing the details that are most appropriate for revealing to our readers what it is we’re trying to say about the world, and the course will emphasize story structure—putting pieces of a story together in the most effective narrative to bring readers along for the ride. This class will examine how the craft of writing works, the myriad small choices writers make in the process of building good stories.
Jeff Lockwood
Jeff Lockwood was hired as an insect ecologist at the University of Wyoming and metamorphosed into a Professor of Natural Sciences & Humanities, with a joint appointment between the MFA program in creative writing and the department of philosophy. His essays have been honored with a Pushcart Prize, a John Burroughs Award, the Albert Schweitzer Sermon Award, and inclusion in Best American Science & Nature Writing. Lockwood’s most recent popular books are Locust: The devastating rise and mysterious disappearance of the insect that shaped the American frontier and Six-Legged Soldiers: Using insects as weapons of war). He’s currently working on The Infested Mind—an entomological tour of the human psyche.
Course Topic: Small is Beautiful: Nature in a Nutshell
This workshop will focus on short forms in environmental writing. I’ve found that this approach has a number of advantages. Crafting a 6-word story, a 12-word memoir, a 55-word essay, or a 400-word meditation provides distillation (revealing the essence of what we are trying to say), discovery (finding that a piece wants to be longer—or even shorter), diversion (allowing playfulness in our approach to writing), and danger (providing a chance to take creative risks without high costs). The problem with writers is that they write—or at least that their love of words entices them into writing too much. Short forms remind us of the power of silence, the unsaid which invites reader to co-create. Our challenge will be emulate nature’s eloquent quietude.
There will be lots of in-class writing to plant ideas, explore forms, open avenues, and launch out-of-class projects. These exercises are intentionally structured to evoke and develop particular skills and perceptions of the natural world. Some of the assignments may serve as the seeds for larger works, a few will have the potential to stand on their own feet (a polished piece being a lovely outcome of a workshop), and others may lie dormant only to emerge later in your writing. I have no idea which experiments will work for which students, but I do know that there is no one-size-fits-all writing exercise and we can be surprised by what catalyzes creativity. So I invite my writers to engage in a willful suspension of disbelief and an intentional openness to what might seem strange, uncomfortable, or absurd.
I try to provide enough structure to create an atmosphere of safety and playfulness. My sense is that too much freedom is stupefying and too little freedom is stultifying. The task of a workshop leader is to have participants neither wandering aimlessly around the ward unable to decide on a hallway to take, nor raging defiantly against their restraints unable to get out of their beds. Rather, you should be out taking walks in the asylum’s garden, wandering off the paths but not trying to mate with the squirrels.
Visiting Faculty
Gail Jokerst
Gail Jokerst is an award-winning writer from West Glacier, Mont., who has taught writing courses at Principia College and Flathead Valley Community College. A magazine and newspaper freelancer for the past 20 years, she covers a spectrum of outdoor topics ranging from cross-country skiing to hiking and travel. Some of her favorite story assignments feature low-profile people doing noteworthy things such as climbing Mount Denali, saving at-risk bluebirds, and spearheading campaigns to clean up polluted rivers. In her afternoon session, Gail will explain how she approaches interviewing and why strong interviewing skills are important for outdoor communicators.
Session Topic: The art of interview
Joel Vance
Joel Vance spent 22 years as an award-winning news and magazine writer for the Missouri Department of Conservation and has been fulltime freelance for 19 years, with two regular magazine columns as well as many articles. He has published seven print books, one book-on-tape. He has been awarded all three of the top honors given by the Outdoor Writers Association of America: Excellence in Craft, its conservation writing honor; the Jade of Chiefs for conservation communication; and the J. Ham Brown Award for service to the organization, the most prestigious OWAA honor. He is one of only three members in the history of the organization to be so honored. He also has been honored with the Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers Excellence in Craft award. Vance is a past president, two time board member and board chairman of OWAA, and was the group’s official historian for six years. He has won numerous writing contests over the years and has been featured in many magazines outside the outdoors field.
Session Topic: TBA
Jack Ballard
Jack Ballard publishes magazine articles and photos pertaining to camping, cross-country skiing, canoeing, hiking, hunting, fishing, children’s conservation education and the natural history of wildlife. In the past ten years his articles and photos have appeared in more than 25 different regional and national magazines. His photos have been published in numerous books, calendars and magazines. He holds two master’s degrees and is an accomplished public speaker, entertaining students, conference attendees and recreation/conservation groups with his compelling narratives. When not wandering the backcountry, he hangs his hat in Red Lodge, Mont.
Session Topic: TBA