Writing the West at AMWA
Join us at AMWA for Writing the West, our 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 [see below]. After spending time with the paintings, you’ll be given a writing prompt from the Story Map, a storytelling model co-created by Writing the West instructor Dan Manzanares.
Throughout the session, you’ll have the chance to share what you wrote next to the painting that inspired you. Writing the West is open to writers of all backgrounds, genres, and skill levels, even those who’ve never written creatively before!
Check back here to find out what each month’s theme is and where on the Story Map we’ll be.
Each writer will have the opportunity to submit their work to be included in the season’s Writing the West anthology. In April we will host a Celebratory Reading of the anthology where writers can invite family and friends to watch them present their work in front of the paintings. Writers included in the anthology will receive a copy of the book and it will be displayed throughout AMWA’s galleries.
Upcoming Sessions
2023-2024 Writing the West themes:
September – Storm
October – Heroes & Villains
November – Heritage & Identity
December – Clothing: Material & Function
January – Storytelling to Scale
February – Setting the Stage
Dan Manzanares is an award-winning literary arts advocate and teacher who holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Western Colorado University. As an author and editor, he’s published community anthologies as well as a nationally recognized arts and culture community engagement toolkit. In 2021, Denver’s Mayor and City Council appointed Dan to the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, where he serves as co-chair. He’s a founding board member of the nonprofit Sidewalk Poets, and co-founder of Story Quest, a creative business teaching aspiring authors how to use the power of storytelling to unlock their imagination.
DIY Writing Prompts
Frontier Myths
Take a few minutes to look around the Museum. Choose a painting that catches your eye. Without looking at its title or who painted it or when, write a list of slogans you believe most captures the painting’s essence. 
Hidden Symbols
In this painting we are witness to a sea of life. Hays was a known documentarian, so we can trust the accuracy of the depiction of the massiveness of this herd. Yet, amidst all this life we are forced to deal with a lone buffalo skull. Its symbol cannot be denied: death.
Parlors and Tunnels
Visit one of the Museum’s three Victorian parlors and observe its contents. Traditionally, the Victorian parlor was a space dedicated to a property owner’s worldliness. It was filled with curiosities, international oddities, exotic book collections, and more. Write a scene describing a character’s parlor. What’s in it? Books and bird skulls, astrolabes and fine furniture? What’s its mood? Brooding, erudite, celebratory? What do we learn about this character?
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.
Working the Mine
Choose a painting that strikes you in some way. Mine the painting of its details, such as colors, composition, subject matter, theme, or all of the above. If it helps, make a list of your findings. Then, use the heat of your imagination to smelt out a piece of writing from this ore. If there’s time, use the same raw materials to write another piece, only this time use a different genre, or a different form within the same genre as your delivery method. What do you notice? What happens, if anything, when you switch forms using the same material?
Western Syntax
A very simple definition of syntax is: the word order of a sentence. One example of how a writer uses word order for her benefit is by having the sentence’s final word carry the most weight. (Ex: “Vini, vidi, vici.” ~Julius Caesar) But can a region possess a signature syntax?
