Paonia Weekend May 18 & 19

Please join me for a literary retreat at the Fresh & Wyld Bed & Breakfast in beautiful Paonia, Colorado. I aim to spoil you silly in my favorite town, which was also my home for 14 years. To start, on Friday, May 18, we’ll join about 20 locals feasting on a homegrown organic dinner while a local author reads to us from their work. The next day, our group (10 or so) will continue a weekend enjoying presentations over breakfast and dinner by local talent.

The term ‘local talent’ is something of an understatement. We will be joined by at least three of the five following writers:  Michelle Nijhuis, my former housemate and dear friend, was but a lass when I met her but holy moly she is now writing for National Geographic. A lapsed biologist, Michelle has won a whole heap of journalistic accolades. A contributing editor to the Paonia-based High Country News, Michelle has also written for Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Orion, Audubon, and The Christian Science Monitor. Her commentaries can be heard occasionally on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Peter Heller won the National Outdoor Book Award with his memoir, KOOK, will read from his fifth book, a novel to be published in August by Knopf. An award-winning adventure writer, Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure, and a regular contributor to Businessweek Magazine.  He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including The Whale Warriors; and Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo Gorge. He, as is apparently commonplace around here, is a contributor to National Public Radio.

The New York Times has called five-time author Craig Childs “a modern-day desert father.” Among his many accolades are the 2003 Spirit of the West Award for his body of work, an honor he shares with Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams and N. Scott Momaday.

And then there’s Paolo Bacigalupi, whose second novel, SHIPBREAKER was a finalist for the — wait for it — the National Book Award. I’m not even kidding. I knew this guy when he was in high school. Maybe we should just bottle some Paonia water while we’re here.

And then there’s, well, me. My memoir is BROKEN: A Love Story, and I could talk about it all day long. While I’m planning to keep busy as the bartender and emcee for this weekend, I will fill out the slate of presenting authors if three of the other four aren’t going to be with us. (They all want to join us, but they tend to jet off to China or the Grand Canyon at a moment’s notice.)

So — two days, three literary presentations (mostly in the evening), and the middle of each day free to snuggle up at the lovely Fresh & Wyld to write, read, induce me to dispense writing exercises, or to explore this friendly, fabulous little town and its gorgeous environs. The walking, hiking and biking (both road biking and single track) around Paonia is fabulous and May is a perfect month for it.

Paonia is located about four and a half hours west of the Front Range in central western Colorado. You can make the trip part of a longer Western Slope vacation by extending your stay at Fresh & Wyld, or incorporating visits to Crested Butte, Aspen, or even the Southern Utah canyon country into your trip.

Cost for both nights’ lodging, breakfasts, dinners, presentations and drinks (in other words, everything except lunch) average $380 per person, double occupancy (I say “average” because some rooms have private bathrooms and some don’t, so rates very slightly.) Single occupancy rooms average $450.