Framing Beauty

Supporting Elk River Writers' Workshop

My friend Summer, a green thumb and fellow clergy kid used to moving around as a kid, often says,“Bloom where you’re planted.”

About a year ago, I would learn that lesson in my writing life. I was wallowing in rejections — almost daily nos or this just isn’t right for us, or we had SO many applicants this year, please don’t let our rejection from our century-old, highly reputable writers’ workshop discourage you.

In the midst of all this frustration, something fortuitous happened last February. I was attending AWP, a colossal writers’ and publishers’ conference in my birth city, Kansas City, MO. My mother, also a writer, and I kept encountering a woman named Sarah, who appeared as if by magic several times before us in the cavernous convention center. We knew we HAD to befriend her. She told us about living in Idaho, writing and working at Western Colorado University, and being part of Elk River.

Then, due to the gigantic scale of the conference center, I missed a session I’d wanted to attend on memoir. By the time I got to the room, it was jammed, so I left, despondent (not just from missing it, but that memoir is THAT popular in a creative field that so often thrives on scarcity).

My mother encouraged me to go to a panel discussion happening right then on travel writing, so I did.

It was there that I first encountered CMarie, a friend and colleague of Sarah’s both at Western and at Elk River. CMarie knocked the socks out of the panel she was on about travel writing.

It was dawning on me that I needed to learn at her feet.

So last May, amid the spate of rejections from journals and storied institutions I know well, I applied to spend a week in Montana with CMarie and many other as of yet unknown writer friends. Sarah would factor in later when I would win a stay at her WPA-built cabin up in the smokestack of Idaho this coming summer (can’t wait!).

I got in the same day.

The workshop was a wonderful week of contrasts: my Southeastern tendencies and education against the sparse, almost barren landscape of the West; my Eastern and European frames of reference against those from, say, rural North Dakota or a new friend of the Yakima. I relished in the differences and newness.

In that week I began an essay borne of fresh frustration at my recent time at Yellowstone, where I visited just before the workshop began. Sadly, if my only choice were to go back in August, I wouldn’t. It’s overrun. So I channeled my anger and sadness (and humor!) into this essay, “Framing Beauty.”

Once again I was welcomed and accepted by Elk River in their publishing this essay in the 10th Anniversary Anthology called Voices Elevated, and I’m so pleased to be in that book alongside so many other writers who have found the magic that Elk River Writers Workshop offers.

Here’s the opening:

One particular painting at my friend David’s debut gallery opening caught my eye.

He is a great painter of landscape. In a roomful of his mostly representational work, my attention fixed on a group of several small plein air paintings from his family’s trip to Yellowstone. Geysers and mountains dominated most of them. But one abstract painting stood out, the least representational of any paintings of David’s I’d ever seen. I would not have known without being told that the orange, teal, and brown foreground and the wispy, smoky horizon was, in fact, exactly how the Grand Prismatic Spring appears in person.

Transfixed, I bought the painting in an elaborate scheme of sending it to our friend Melissa’s house where she could intercept it. On Christmas morning, I would produce it as a surprise for my partner Russell, who had been to Yellowstone before we met; he loved the place so much he kept saying that we needed to go.

So we went last August.

But my built-up image of Yellowstone, built in part through David’s abstracted vision of it, did not match up at all with the reality I endured. When David and I finally had a chance to debrief about our recent lives — the absurd proportions of packaging at Costco, the vagaries of church leadership, art in many forms, and my frustrations with traveling to Yellowstone in summer, he told me simply but clearly, “You may need to reframe your time there.” Interspersed with our ramblings was talk about that small, abstracted painting of his.

I’m happy to say that Elk River is making Voices Elevated, along with three other incredible books, available through their Kickstarter fundraiser. All proceeds will support the workshop, which in 2025 will host an all-Native faculty. You can buy any books you like in any format and in any combination, including a compilation of CMarie’s columns for the Inlander, in which she grapples with everything under the sun. Swag is available, too, but I’ve been told we already have enough mugs at home.

So I’m plugging Elk River for their incredible work at keeping the arts going in this fractured world, and I can’t wait to join my friends (and make new ones) in Montana this summer, not to mention spending my days writing at that Idaho cabin of Sarah’s.

Not only does it feel good to be welcomed, but to bloom where I’ve been planted.