Creative Tensions: Wild Words & Wild Places

Please join renowned authors Amy Irvine, Chris La Tray, and Shelley Read for “Creative Tensions: Wild Words & Wild Places.” This interactive community event will take place at the Canyon Community Center on Friday, February 21, and is presented by Zion Canyon Mesa and Torrey House Press. Facilitator Will Neville-Rehbehn will guide the audience and this trio of renowned writers through an exploration of place, perspective, and the power of story. “Creative Tensions” is a unique format for collective conversation that encourages openness and inspires empathy as we explore topics that lie at the heart of what it means to be human.

About the Writers:

Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn and long-time public lands activist. She is the author of the award-winning memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land; Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness; and with Pam Houston, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place. Irvine is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and an acclaimed writing instructor. Irvine lives and writes off-grid, on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado, stone's throw from her Utah homeland.

Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. His third book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home was recently announced as a winner of the 2025 Pacific Northwest Book Award. He is also the author of One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large and Descended from a Travel-worn Satchel. La Tray writes the weekly newsletter "An Irritable Métis" and lives near Frenchtown, Montana. He is the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023–2025.

Shelley Read is an international bestselling novelist whose debut, Go As A River, is translated into thirty-four languages and appears on bestseller lists worldwide. Go As A River is a Sunday Times bestseller, Goodreads Choice Award Finalist, Amazon Editor's Pick, and won the Reading the West and High Plains Book Awards. Read taught writing, literature, and environmental studies at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades. She is a fifth generation Coloradan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of Colorado’s Western Slope.