2025 Yearlong Workshop with Karen Auvinen

A Walk in the Woods: Mapping New Territory and Exploring the Terrain of Your Book-Length Story

“A journey of a thousand miles is begins with a single step”  —Laozi

Just as a walk in the forest reveals hidden paths and surprising discoveries, this Yearlong workshop invites you to uncover the path of your own story by learning to trust your intuition and the act of putting one foot in front of the other.
Applications Open November 1, 2024

About Fishtrap’s Yearlong Writers Workshop

Fishtrap’s Yearlong Writers Workshop is a 13-month intensive distance-learning program that focuses on one-on-one instruction to help you reach your goals as a writer. During the year, students work closely with their instructor exchanging monthly packets of writing for review and improvement. With each packet, the writer moves closer toward the development of a full-length manuscript. 

What makes Fishtrap’s Yearlong program unique from other distance learning programs is how it begins and concludes with a week of in-person instruction at the annual Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers. Summer Fishtrap is a weeklong writers’ conference featuring workshops, craft talks, readings, conversations, and opportunities to connect all in the inspiring setting of Wallowa Lake. The Yearlong program is modeled after low residency MFA programs at about half the cost. So if you don’t need a degree but want high-quality sustained support for your writing, this program could be the perfect fit for you. 

With Karen Auvinen’s support and guidance, each writer will get to know their own terrain whether it’s fiction or nonfiction and build the skills they need to fearlessly and joyfully commit to taking their story from a collage of ideas to a completed manuscript. 

Through immersion in a community of writers, monthly talks about a range of craft concerns such as generative drafting, building character, pacing, the use of landscape and setting, writing evocatively and sensually, and getting unstuck, in addition to regular cohort and instructor feedback, you’ll learn to navigate the challenges of book-writing while embracing both the wonder of the unknown and deep immersion in your work. By the end of the year, your goal is a completed manuscript but, as a bonus, you will also have a deeper understanding of your own creative process and who you are as a writer, ready to take on any writing adventure that comes your way.

We’ll begin our adventure at Fishtrap 2025 by reading foundational books, sharing ideas and stories, and plotting where we think we want to go, before sketching outlines, thematic foundations, and structure, and working to develop key scenes and/or characters in our narratives. At Fishtrap 2026, we’ll celebrate our first drafts and the sense of accomplishment that comes with it and discuss next steps whether it’s revision of your first draft or publication.

Between gatherings, book-writers will: 

• Be supported by a book-writing community with two monthly Zoom Meetings: The first with the entire group, including Karen, to write, share news, ask questions, discuss craft concerns, and do some generative writing and the second with a small group of your peers for workshop.
• Will submit, after revision, a packet of writing (up to 40 pages) to Karen for comment, suggestions, and support., along with a revision letter outlining your process and what burning questions you have for the work at hand. Book-writers should plan to meet with Karen one-on-one for personal instruction and feedback at least six times during the year. 
• Receive individual recommendations for reading and exercises to support your book.

Please get in touch with Fishtrap Program Director Mike Midlo with questions.

Read  about the 2024-25 Yearlong Workshop with Amy Irvine