As writers telling the stories of women in the West, whether real or imagined, whether set in the past, present, or future, we are inevitably writing from the land. More than any region in the country, the West is shaped by the physical factors of topography, weather, and the plants and animals whose lives color and shape these wild spaces.
In this panel, we four—writers from different parts of the West with different perspectives—will consider what writing from the land means through two essential questions: How does the land shape our writing and our perspectives? How can we communicate the essence of the West—including its rich and sometimes thorny history and diverse present—in ways that convey the promise of our region?
The panelists:
After becoming a cowboy by choice in her ‘30s, Amy Hale’s poetry, novels, and creative nonfiction began flowing out of her work on the remote Spider Ranch in Arizona, a landscape so rugged that Amy and her husband (and boss), Gail Steiger, move cows by horseback, ATV, and on foot, spending days camped out on the land as they trail their herd between the low desert and higher plateaus.
Native Utahn Pam Olson writes from the Sandy Bench of the Salt Lake Valley. Her work is informed by her love of flowers—she owned a floral shop for 20 years—and her magazine editing and writing experience. She is currently at work on a memoir shaped by birds and birding adventures.
Botanist and self-described “sagebrush girl” Susan J. Tweit writes from the high desert of western Colorado, where the high mesas and mountains rise above a valley filled with organic farms. The view from her writing desk is an interplay between domestic and wild, with thousands of peach and apple trees in the foreground, and beyond them, miles of wild, sagebrush- and Gambel oak-covered mesas extending to the far horizon.
Dawn Wink, Professor of Language and Literacy at Eastern New Mexico, writes from the intersection of language and landscape, scholarship and family stories. Her work is rooted in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico, where she grew up on the Cascabel Ranch, and informed by her family history of ranching in South Dakota, plus decades of living the high desert of New Mexico.
What we offer:
Four voices, four perspectives, four ways of writing from the land and chronicling this diverse region we call the West.
Join us for a lively and thought-provoking discussion of how we honor these extraordinary landscapes and the stories that arise from them.
Writing from the Land
Susan J. Tweit, Dawn Wink, Pam Olson, Amy Hale
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM Saturday Oct 17
2026 Annual Women Writing the West Conference registration portal
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