Writing the West
We invite writers across Colorado—both aspiring and established—to join AMWA for Writing the West, the monthly writing series combining art history, storytelling, and participants’ creative voices. To help inspire your writing, we’ll explore the Museum’s galleries, stopping to learn about specific paintings relevant to each month’s theme. After spending time with the paintings, you’ll be given a thematic, art-inspired writing prompt by Writing the West instructor, Dan Manzanares.
Throughout each writing session, you’ll have the chance to share your work next to the painting that inspired you. Writing the West is open to writers of all backgrounds, genres, and skill levels, even those who have never written creatively before!
Participants will have the opportunity to submit their writing to be included in the season’s Writing the West anthology. In April, we’ll host a Celebratory Reading where writers can invite family and friends to watch them present their work from the anthology in the galleries. Anthology contributors will receive a copy of the book, which will be displayed throughout AMWA’s galleries for all to enjoy.
Dan Manzanares has co-taught Writing the West with AMWA educators since the program’s inception in 2016. That same year, he won a Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Arts & Culture, and in 2021 accepted a mayoral appointment to the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, where he served as chair. Dan received his MFA with a concentration in genre fiction from Western Colorado University, and is currently an instructor at Story Quest – Map Your Novel.
This season we’ll explore a different Western literary subgenre each month:
September 9 – Cattle Drive
October 14 – Bounty Hunter
November 11 – Doctor and Preacher
December 9 – Land Rush
January 13 – Range Wars, Cattlemen vs. Sheepmen
February 10 – Women of the West
April 14 – Celebratory Reading
Upcoming Sessions
DIY Writing Prompts
Download art-inspired writing prompts from previous sessions of Writing the West and participate in this great collaboration on your own.
Traditional Western: Town-Tamer
A subgenre of the Traditional Western is Town-Tamer. Use the prompt guide to imagine a crisis in a frontier town, then create a character whose job it is to bring order to the chaos. What internal consequences must this person deal with post-taming?
Historical Fiction
Blend history with hearsay to create poignant historical fiction poems and stories, using AMWA’s The Great Royal Buffalo Hunt and artifacts from the Buffalo Bill Museum & Grave.
Folklore
Celebrate the seemingly simple yet powerful characters found in the folklore genre. Fairy tales, tall tales, myths, fables are all game for your poetry and prose!
Cozy Mystery
Explore the popular genre of cozy mystery by using the prompt guide to choose your cozy small-town setting and amateur detective.
Weird West: Cowpunk
Embrace the weird by using the prompt guide to visit the galleries’ paintings and adding automatons, time travel, ray guns, and mad scientists to your poems and stories.
Alternate History
In alternate history, the “hinge point” shifts the known flow of history of an event, exploring new outcomes. Download the prompt guide, then use poetry or fiction to practice this tactic.
Western Wayfinding: No GPS, No Problem
Whether it’s animal sign, technology, or the starry sky, wayfinding can embody different techniques. Follow the prompt guide to gain access to the stories of Western trailblazers.
Storytelling to Scale
The scale or scope of a scene—whether grand and expansive or closed in and tight—can influence a character’s thoughts and emotions, thus affecting a poem’s or story’s voice, its style. Use the
three paintings in the prompt guide to practice different combinations of scale and voice.
Setting the Stage
When working on a painting, different artists use different processes. Some isolate themselves, while others form accountability communities; some do research and conduct interviews, while others embark on expeditions and create in the field. As you write using the prompt guide, reflect on which tactics might be the most beneficial for you as a storyteller and add them to your process.
Clothing: Material & Function
From buckskin to buffalo robes, to peace medals and cowboy hats, clothing’s function can be practical, meaningful, or both. By using motifs, symbols, or devices, a writer chooses how to convey small details or big ideas. Download the prompt guide to practice each technique!
Progress & Protest
Look at the image of Jessy Bushyhead and consider how Native Americans were asked/told/forced to assimilate to American customs. Then, turn that same lens inward and look at how you are asked/told/forced to assimilate to the West. Is it through the media, laws, food, clothing, religion, transportation, war? Is there a Way of the West? If so, do you subscribe to it?
Western Color Palette
Think about the colors you’ve witnessed as being most prevalent in the Mountain West, Southwest, or West Coast and create a color palette of one of these regions. Then, pick a painting whose subject matter looks to be from the same region. Is its color palette similar or different than what you described? Write down your observations.
