Floating the deepest river gorge wilderness in North America with Gary Ferguson and Mary M Clare.  This  workshop is an Outpost for Fishtrap , a local non-profit whose mission is to promote “clear thinking and good writing in and about the West.”

Join best-selling nature writer Gary Ferguson and social scientist Mary M Clare for a grand adventure on one of the world’s most beautiful rivers. Along the way you’ll learn not just new techniques to empower your writing, but also ways to grow a deeper relationship with wild nature – in the process, bringing fresh vitality to the stories you tell.

Writing well means honing essential storytelling skills – gaining facility with things like transition, setting, tone, and narrative arc. But we also believe that the energy needed to really animate your writing – to bring energy and spirit to your stories – comes from learning to look and listen more deeply. And each day on the Snake River, we’ll be doing exactly that – helping you build the kind of kinship to the world around you that will resonate powerfully with your readers. From the first dip of our oars to our final sunrise, this is a journey to shape not just your writing, but your life.

This program also includes individual manuscript review, as well as one-on-one sessions with the instructors.

Best-selling nature writer Gary Ferguson spent the early years of his career “chronicling the tracks humans leave in nature.” For the past two decades, however, the author Publishers Weekly calls “ever-evocative” has been working instead “to portray the tracks nature leaves in us.” Ferguson is the author of 27 books, including the highly acclaimed The Carry Home , winner of the Sigurd Olson Award, and described by The Los Angeles Times as a book with “beauty on every page.” His latest work, The Eight Master Lessons of Nature , shines a powerful light on the dazzling processes that nourish the creative powers of nature – and further, what they can teach us about navigating our own lives. Ferguson has taught at dozens of writing workshops in the United States and Europe and spent a decade on the faculty for the Rainier Writing Workshop Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific Lutheran University. He is a co-founder of Full Ecology, with social scientist Dr. Mary M. Clare

From Montana, via Texas, California, Georgia, Nebraska, and Oregon, Mary M Clare, Ph.D.  brings her lifelong passion for the natural world together with a 30-year career as a social and cultural psychologist. A fellow in the American Psychological Association with over 100 scholarly articles, she opens doorways for considering how the natural world – both around us and inside of us – can be tapped as a guiding force for creating more contented and fruitful lives. Dr. Clare is also a published poet and an Oregon Pen Women finalist. She’s written three nonfiction books, including 100 Voices: Americans Talk about Change (2011) and most recently, with science and nature writer Gary Ferguson, the award-winning Full Ecology: Repairing Our Relationship with the Natural World . Her spirited insights and techniques are helping nature writers forge new perspectives, deepening the relationship between their creative instincts and the world around them.

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