The poet William Stafford said that a writer is a person who enters into a relationship with language for an experience that cannot be had any other way. In this workshop, we will call this relationship "spiritual," and we will use writing to move us into the realms of close attention, improbable encounter, and unknowing. Using pen and paper, we will explore questions such as: Can you have a spiritual encounter with an orange? Do we write what we know or what we don't know? How do we engage what Stafford calls a "wilder, unplanned, utterly trustworthy" practice for our writing?

Amy Frykholm is a writer of non-fiction and poetry. She is author of three books of non-fiction and will, she hopes, be finished with a fourth by the time she teaches this workshop. Her poems and essays have been published in Poetry, Quiddity, Soundings, and other publications. She lives up the hill in Leadville.