The Ground We Share: A week of writing, conversation, and deep attention to place.
June 14 – 19, 2027
Registration opens December 1, 2027.
Registration $1,595 or $1,425 for Fishtrappers
Includes all meals and tent camping. Installment payment options available.
Join a small group of writers and unplug for a week, be inspired by nature, and have the time and support to write about it. Fishtrap’s Outpost on the Zumwalt Prairie connects you with a cohort of creative writers and an experienced instructor to help guide you on your writing journey.
Author and educator CMarie Fuhrman leads the 2027 program, supported by biologist Janet Hohmann, to create an experience that uncovers new ways to interpret and interact with the natural world.
Outpost takes place on The Nature Conservancy Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, a 33,000 acre grassland in rural Wallowa County, Oregon. Instructor CMarie Fuhrman will guide workshop participants to explore new ways to invigorate your writing through discovery of the natural world.
Continue your Outpost experience with Beyond the Prairie
The stories and connections begun on the Zumwalt Prairie deserve a place to grow. If you are looking to cultivate your writing, this 8-month add-on program — led by CMarie — provides you with a dedicated space to transform your generative work from Outpost into polished, submittable poems and prose.
NOTE: Beyond the Prairie is open to 2027 Outpost Workshop participants only.
What becomes possible when we give our full attention to the ground we share?
On the Zumwalt Prairie, ground is never simply ground. It is soil and basalt, bunchgrass and wildflowers, burrows and bones, weather and memory—a living web of relationships extending far beyond any single story. During Fishtrap Outpost, we will enter that web with curiosity, learning from the prairie while considering the ground we share as writers, readers, and members of human and more-than-human communities.
CMarie will lead our writing practice and conversations, bringing poems, essays, questions, and generative exercises that help us explore the relationships among language, place, and belonging. Renowned naturalist Janet will guide us more deeply into the life of the prairie, sharing her remarkable knowledge and helping us notice what we might otherwise pass by. Each participant will also bring knowledge, experience, and questions to the conversation. This is a week of learning from the land, from one another, and from what emerges when we pay close attention.
Our days will include guided writing, readings, walks on the prairie, deep discussions, service, campfire conversations, and generous stretches of quiet time to write or simply be on the land. Meals matter here, too: extraordinary food shared around a common table, where conversation and laughter become part of the week’s creative life.
Fishtrap Outpost offers something increasingly rare. The group is intimate. Phones do not work. Without the usual stream of demands and interruptions, conversations can unfold in their own time, the senses sharpen, and writing can come from a deeper place. This is less an escape from the world than a return to it—a chance to remember how much becomes visible when we are fully present.
Come with work underway or with an empty notebook. Come with expertise or uncertainty, a question you have carried for years or one you have only begun to form. All genres and levels of experience are welcome. You will leave with new writing, new ways of seeing, and a deeper sense of your place upon the ground we share.