Writing the West

We invite writers across Colorado—both aspiring and established—to 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, 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. He received his MFA with a concentration in genre fiction from Western Colorado University. He’s an advisory board member of Sidewalk Poets and Rocky Mountain Reader; and teaches aspiring novelists at Story Quest.

This season will explore a different literary genre each month:

September 10 – Alternate History
October 8 – Weird West: Cowpunk
November 12 – Cozy Mystery
December 10 – Folklore
January 14 – Historical Fiction
February 11 – Traditional Western: Town-Tamer
April 8 – 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. 

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.

Navarre through the Ages

1727 Tremont Place has gone through many phases from its final completion in 1880. Download the prompt guide to write stories and poems inspired by each major phase.

The Seasons of Haiku

Check out the prompt guide to learn about how to write haiku while using the guide’s paintings to practice writing in this short yet meaningful form.

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 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.


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.


Always Howling Woman, painting by Winold Reiss

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!


Are You Calling Me a Liar, painting by William Henry Dethlef Koerner

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.


Joseph Henry Sharp painting of an American Indian winter encampment

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.

Mountain Landscape, painting by Albert Bierstadt

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.

William Jacob Hays' painting, The Gathering of the Herds

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.

Frederic Remington, "A Cold Morning on the Range", 1904

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?