Sawtooth Writing Retreat – Featured on KIVI
Video Transcript: Sawtooth Writing Retreat
Steve Dent: The Hemingway Center at Boise State University is hosting the Sawtooth Writing Retreat. I’m your Idaho Backroads neighborhood reporter, Steve Dent, and this is an area where Ernest Hemingway found solitude, peace, and inspiration through the dark skies and the magic of the mornings.
Participant 1: We heard elk bugling while we were sitting out eating lunch our first day here, and just being able to see the aspen trees starting to turn. So, being able to just be here in a cabin on-site and, like, roll out of bed in the morning and watch the sunrise, sit and hear the aspen trees quaking—I can write so much about the quaking of aspen leaves in the sun.
Participant 2: What do I see, smell, hear, feel, taste?
Steve: The Sawtooth Writing Retreat invites writers out to the woods north of Ketchum, where they get classes and instruction from Paul Bogart and Kim Cross. Again, looking for those things to call them fact.
Participant 3: I think Kim and Paul are really great. So they’re both, um, professional writing teachers, you know, at university level, both, uh, with multiple publications, different perspectives that are really great to hear.
Steve: While we were there, Kim and Paul did a lesson where the Central Idaho 4-H Camp caretaker, Tom, taught a lesson on chopping wood. For the students, it provided an opportunity
(Participant:—are you here year-round? Tom: I’d like to be—)
Steve: to build a character and journal a scene as it unfolded in front of them.
Participant 1: We have breakout writing sessions. I’m hoping this year to spend some time, honestly, I—I sit on a stump in one of the fields and I’ve been working on editing some of my pieces. So it’s a bit of a mix of meeting new fellow writers, uh, learning from them, learning from Kim and Paul, uh, eating some lovely, fantastic food.
Steve: Don Brockett helped write the dark sky application for this area while earning a master’s degree at Boise State University. Don finds it easier to write away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Participant 3: I love the tie to Hemingway, the Hemingway Center, Boise State, the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, Ketchum. I think it’s a really beautiful time. I’ve had the pleasure of, you know, living in this area, living in Paris where Hemingway also lived. I haven’t done the Keys or Cuba yet, but I think he was onto something in terms of really sustaining locations for, uh, writerly life.
Steve: This marks the second year Boise State has hosted the Sawtooth Writing Retreat, and it also marks the second year Annie Ferman made the trip from British Columbia.
Participants: Captain America log… pull for the retreat.
Participant 1: Yeah, I’m so grateful for BSU for putting this together, man. I mean, I was here last year and it was so fantastic that I came back for a second year. And I love that BSU is putting this on and, you know, inviting folks from the broader community as well.
Steve: And for more information or opportunities like the Sawtooth Writing Retreat, you can check out the Hemingway Center on the campus of Boise State University. I’m your Idaho Backroads neighborhood reporter, Steve Dent, for Idaho News.
Center for Creativity and Community
Founded in 1986, the Hemingway Center is a cultural and artistic hub on campus that supports a variety of Creative Writing programs, art performances, events, and educational experiences for students and the community.Â
Upcoming Event Spotlight
The Hemingway Center Presents
A talk by Michael von Cannon
co-editor of the Hemingway Letters
Iceberg Right Ahead: Ernest Hemingway And The Invention Of In Our Time
January 29, 2025, 1:30pm
Free to the public
In his bullfighting treatise, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway advanced his famous theory about writing, which he likened to “the dignity of movement of an ice-berg.” Although that massive book is rarely read in full, the iceberg theory is so well-known that it has become almost synonymous with the writer himself. But what is the iceberg theory, really? Did Hemingway invent it and, if so, when and under what circumstances? And what are the implications (and even risks), for artist and reader, of rendering the world in this profoundly new way? To begin answering such questions, we will bring to life Hemingway’s early years in Paris as we explore his modernist short story, “In Our Time.”
Connect with Us
For additional information about the Hemingway Center, please email hemingway@boisestate.edu.