Scorched Earth Monsoon - an immersive writing workshop with Ruth Nolan

59700 Twentynine Palms Highway,Joshua Tree CA 92252

30 October, 2022

Description

Location: Friendship Hall at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center The Mojave Desert draws people in from all over the world in search of restoration and renewal. This immersive writing workshop with longtime writing professor/author Ruth Nolan – herself a lifelong resident of the Mojave Desert – will guide participants in connecting with our inspirational desert environment in new and surprising ways by embarking on a guided word walk through landscape and word. Drawing her motivation to create and lead this workshop from the ravages, losses and transformations of our inner and external landscapes through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Ruth will guide participants through a the impacts of extreme heat, epic drought, and active monsoon rains affecting our desert places vividly throughout these turbulent times as we reflect, renew, and transform ourselves and our relationships with our desert environments through the power of creating our own written and shared words. Stay after the workshop and join Ruth for a poetry reading at 2pm featuring work from After the Dome Fire, followed by a conversation with Cheryl Montelle. About Ruth Nolan: Ruth Nolan grew up in the Mojave Desert’s Victor Valley and is professor of creative writing at College of the Desert. She is author of a new poetry book, After the Dome Fire (Bamboo Dart Press), and her writing has been most recently and notably published in Boom: California; KCET Los Angeles; McSweeney’s; Joshua Tree: Where Two Deserts Meet (Wildsam National Parks) and Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California (Angel City Press, 2023). A California desert literature scholar, she is editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday Books) and curator of the humanities project Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California, based in part on her experiences fighting wildfire for the USFS and BLM CA Desert District. Her writing has been supported by a 2022 Joshua Tree Folk School Residency and also previously by the California Residency at Yefe Nof, Breadloaf, and California Humanities. She is founder and instructor of the Writing Your Inner Desert workshop at the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National park and co-founder of the Inlandia Institute creative workshop program. The Joshua Tree Retreat Center and Joshua Tree Folk School are proud to present this program with Ruth Nolan, as part of their artist residency program.