ENTERPRISE — Fishtrap is now taking applications for a yearlong writers workshop with Amy Irvine. The 13-month distance-learning program focuses on one-on-one instruction.

During the year, students work with the instructor by exchanging monthly packets of writing for review and improvement. With each packet, the writer moves closer toward the goal of developing a full-length manuscript.

The program begins and ends with a week of in-person instruction at the annual Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers, a weeklong writers’ conference featuring workshops, craft talks, readings, conversations and more at Wallowa Lake.

About the workshop

Whether starting from scratch or starting with an initial draft, this workshop will help develop characters, structures, plots and scenes.

The first in-person gathering is July 2024 for Summer Fishtrap, and the workshop concludes at the July 2025 session.

Between the two summer gatherings, participants will meet as a group once a month on Zoom for 2½ hours of instruction, discussion and writing.

Also, students will submit monthly packets of writing to Irvine of up to 30 pages of new and/or revised work, plus a cover letter about the process, then receive detailed feedback and suggestions for what to accomplish for the next deadline.

Also, Irvine will provide recommendations on exercises, books, essays, poems, stories, scholarship and podcasts to support each project, as well as monthly email and/or phone exchanges.

An additional in-person winter weekend gathering, which is optional, will be offered halfway through the workshop.

Tuition for the yearlong workshop is $7,500, which includes registration and workshop instruction for the Summer Fishtrap Gathering July 8-14, 2024 and July 7-13, 2025.

Learn more at fishtrap.org.

About the instructor

Irvine’s memoir, “Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land,” received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Colorado Book Award.

“Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness” was included in Orion Magazine’s 25 Most-Read Stories of the Decade, Outside’s Adventure Canon, Backpacker’s New Wilderness Classics and Recommended Reads from Stanford University’s climate scientists.

Her essays have appeared in Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best American Food Writing series, and she is a contributing editor for Orion. For over a decade she has taught fiction and nonfiction in the Mountainview MFA Program at Southern New Hampshire University; she has also taught for Fishtrap’s Outpost, Whitman College’s Semester in the West, Freeflow Institute, and Orion’s Environmental Writing Workshops at both the Omega Institute in New York and the American Museum of Natural History’s Research Station in Arizona.

Irvine will be the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer for the University of Montana’s Environmental Humanities Program in spring of 2024. She lives and writes off-grid on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado. Her second memoir, “Almost Animal,” is forthcoming by Spiegel & Grau.