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. After spending time with the paintings, you’ll be given a thematic writing prompt inspired by the art by Writing the West instructor Dan Manzanares. Throughout each 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!
Participants will have the opportunity to submit their work 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 front of the paintings. Anthology contributors will receive a copy of the book, which will be displayed throughout AMWA’s galleries for all to enjoy.
Upcoming Sessions
2024-2025 Writing the West themes:
September – Prairie Tech
October – Iconic Animals
November – Colorful Characters
January – The Seasons of Haiku
February – From Boarding School to Jazz Club, The Navarre through the Decades
March – Western Wayfinding: No GPS, No Problem
May – Celebratory Reading
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 appointed Dan to the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, where he served as Chair. He’s a founding board member of Sidewalk Poets; an advisory board member of Rocky Mountain Reader; and co-founder of Story Quest, a creative business teaching aspiring authors how to use the power of storytelling to unlock their imaginations.
DIY Writing Prompts
Colorful Characters
Baby Doe Tabor, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Captain William Drummond Stewart lived very interesting lives. Use the prompt guide to explore their perspectives while adding a little to their myth and legend.
Iconic Animals
175 years ago, the relationship between people and animals in the West was based upon domestication. Quite possibly, it’s the same today. The prompt guide will help you dig into the continuum of domesticity and the wild.
Prairie Tech
Use the prompt guide to imagine three different perspectives of prairie travelers: the people who were sold the “myth of the West;” immigrants from the eastern United States; and Native residents of the plains.
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 thethree 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.
Heritage & Identity
Writers use setting to talk about more than just the qualities of a place. A character's identity and culture to name two. Follow the prompt guide and learn how setting drives the themes of a poem or story.
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!
Heroes & Villains
Heroes and villains, protagonists and antagonists, main characters and conflict characters. Use 'character arc,' defined in the prompt guide, to write a story or poem that challenges the binary nature of good guys versus bad guys.
Storm
Storms, both literal and figurative, are great for motivating characters to take the initiative in their life and for choosing a new adventure that becomes their story. Follow the prompt guide, using these three paintings (or others) along the way, to write the beginnings of a story.
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.
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.
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?
