Writer’s Round Up with Lesley Poling-Kempes and Robin McLean – G24080401
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A retreat/workshop for experienced writers who want to dig deeper into a book project or explore and organize a new one, and to reconnect with the writing life while part of a community of writers at Ghost Ranch.
The purpose of this focused time in the inspiring mountains and light of Ghost Ranch will be to reinvigorate your writing. To wake generative processes that you might have lost touch with. To find new access points into your work via community with other writers, via the metaphors of Nature. This week, you will explore new works you had not imagined and leave the Ranch with new energy to continue.
Mornings will include an hour and a half workshop led by Lesley Poling-Kempes and Robin McLean. (Attendance not mandatory) The remainder of the day is for writing and for evaluation and process sessions with Robin/Lesley. Evenings we will read, share, discuss, and explore all things literary — and not — as a group. Guest author talks to be announced.
Participants will bring their own preferred work essentials – laptop, iPad, paper, notebooks, pencils, pens etc. Most housing and rooms will have a desk and chair. There are also places and spaces to write around Ghost Ranch including the library and shaded portals on various public buildings. Wifi is available but spotty.
Robin McLean is an experienced author and teacher and is a visiting instructor of writing at the University of Montana, Missoula. In the last two years her books “Pity the Beast” and “Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing” received international praise and glowing reviews in the New York Times Book Review.
Lesley Poling-Kempes is the author of award winning fiction and nonfiction books about the American Southwest. Her most recent book, “Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women & Their Adventures in the American Southwest” won the Reading the West Award and other prizes, and is optioned for a television series.
Instructors
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Lesley Poling-KempesLesley Poling-Kempes is the award winning author of seven fiction and nonfiction books about the American Southwest. In 2020 her work received the Harris Award “for outstanding contribution to the understanding of the people, culture, and history of the American West.” Her books include “Bone Horses” winner of the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction and the Tony Hillerman Award; “The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West,” Zia Award winner, and “Canyon of Remembering” Western Writers of America Spur Award finalist for Best First Novel.
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Robin McLeanRobin McLean worked as a lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her first story collection Reptile House won the BOA Editions Fiction Prize and was noted as a best book of 2015 in Paris Review. Her debut novel Pity the Beast was noted as a best book of fiction of 2021 in The Guardian and Wall Street Journal, and long-listed for the Reading the West Prize. Her second story collection, Get’em Young, Treat’em Tough, Tell’em Nothing was an Editors’ Choice in the NYTimes, and was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
She is currently the 2023 Visiting Writer in the MFA program at the University of Montana. When not wandering the American Mountain West, she’s found in Canada on the edge of the Salish Sea.