Each of us has a “heart place”—a spot in a natural landscape where we feel profoundly connected to both the earth and ourselves. This workshop is an invitation to investigate one of your significant heart places. This might be the woods near your home where you walk the dog each day or a long-ago body of water where you haven’t dipped a toe in since you were a child. In this writing workshop, we will create poems that dig into the colors, textures, and scents of these heart places, peeling back the layers of personal observation and embodied memory to discover what makes our hearts wild for wild places. All levels of writing are welcome.

Bio: Keetje Kuipers’ most recent collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Poems from her three previous collections have been honored by publication in The Pushcart Prizeand Best American Poetry anthologies, and her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, POETRY, and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest.