2024 Yearlong Writers Workshop with Amy Irvine
It Runs Like a River
Finding the Flow and Staying the Course of a Book-Length Story
The 2024-2025 Yearlong Program is SOLD OUT
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.
From Amy Irvine
From journal musings to polished manuscript, it’s an epic process—like traveling the length of a watershed from headwaters to open sea. Weather swings. Terrain shifts. The water level rises, falls. Around every bend, obstacles abound—but so do inspiration, beauty, and wonder. The journey is transformative.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or have an initial draft, whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, students will all be in the same boat, shaping stories into their best, highest forms. Along the way, you’ll receive individual support for both your craft and creative process. We’ll not only tackle the nuts and bolts—in which we flesh out characters, build structures, and intensify plots. We’ll also do the deeper dives into research, metaphor, and psychological subtext. Along the way, we’ll craft visceral scenes and unforgettable sentences. We’ll even experience the liberation that awaits us in the daunting process of revision.
Our group will meet in person for a week of writing and conversation at the July 2024 and July 2025 Summer Fishtrap gatherings on the shores of Wallowa Lake in Oregon. Students will leave the initial gathering with a strategic and creative plan for the year ahead. Whether you prefer to be pushed hard or gently guided, Amy will meet you wherever you are.
Between the two summer gatherings, participants will:
- Meet as a group once a month on Zoom for 2.5 hours of instruction, discussion, and generative writing.
- Submit monthly packets of writing to Amy—up to 30 pages of new and/or revised work, plus a cover letter about your process.
- Receive detailed personalized feedback from Amy —via annotations and suggested line edits as well as a cover letter with big picture comments and suggestions for what to accomplish for the next deadline.
- Receive individual recommendations on exercises, books, essays, poems, stories, scholarship and/or podcasts to inform and support your project and/or your creative process.
- Receive additional individual support from Amy Irvine via monthly email and/or phone exchanges.
- Attend an in-person, winter weekend gathering, halfway through the year. (Optional. Location, date, and time TBD.)
Yearlong Writers Workshop Tuition
$7,500
A $625 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your spot in the class.
Tuition is due in monthly payments of $625 beginning July 8, 2024. You will receive a 10% discount if your tuition is paid in full by July 8, 2024.
Tuition Includes:
Registration and Workshop instruction for the Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers July 8-14, 2024 and July 7-13, 2025 Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers.
- All individual monthly instruction during the Yearlong Writers Workshop course.
Tuition does NOT include:
- Lodging or meals for the 2024 and 2025 Weeklong Summer Fishtrap Gatherings
- Transportation to or from Summer Fishtrap
- Materials and postage expenses
- Communications expenses
Please get in touch with Fishtrap Program Director Mike Midlo with questions.
Amy Irvine’s memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Colorado Book Award. Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to western wilderness icon Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and was included in Orion Magazine’s 25 Most-Read Stories of the Decade, Outside’s Adventure Canon, Backpacker’s New Wilderness Classics, and Recommended Reads from Stanford University’s climate scientists. Irvine’s essays have appeared in Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best American Food Writing series, and she is a contributing editor for Orion. For over a decade she has taught fiction and nonfiction in the Mountainview MFA Program at Southern New Hampshire University; she has also taught for Fishtrap’s Outpost, Whitman College’s Semester in the West, Freeflow Institute, and Orion’s Environmental Writing Workshops at both the Omega Institute in NY and the American Museum of Natural History’s Research Station in Arizona. Irvine will be the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer for University of Montana’s Environmental Humanities Program in spring of 2024. She lives and writes off-grid on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. Her second memoir, Almost Animal, is forthcoming by Spiegel & Grau.