Rebecca Lawton: Rivers Teach Me to Write: A Guide to the Natural Flow of Words
July 19, 2025, 11 a.m.
Finley Center in Santa Rosa
Writers of all genres will be inspired by this conversation about how we can learn wisdom and writing lessons from rivers and water. With award-winning author Rebecca Lawton, we’ll look at examples of water- and nature-driven prose, discuss what works about them, and try our own hands at applying principles of flow to our writing-in-progress. Attendees are encouraged to bring burning questions about form and process, as well as writing tools so we can spend much of the time in creating, shaping, and optional sharing. This will be a safe space to explore roadblocks to progress, potential paths forward, and the wellsprings of our inspiration—this amazing, incomparable world we live in.
Rebecca Lawton is an author, fluvial geologist, and former Grand Canyon river guide. She has published hundreds of essays, poems, and stories, in Hunger Mountain, Terrain.org, Orion, and other journals. Her writing honors include a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, Ellen Meloy Award for Desert Writers, WILLA in fiction, Pushcart Prize nominations, and residencies at Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers, the Island Institute, and PLAYA. She’s the author of the best-selling Reading Water: Lessons from the River, the Rubery Prize shortlisted What I Never Told You: Stories, the New Women’s Voices honoree Swimming Grand Canyon and Other Poems, and other books. She lives and writes in northern California, where she’s at work on Boatwoman: A River Memoir (Bison Books/University of Nebraska, 2027).