Something has been waiting beneath the noise of ordinary life — for wide sky, for fire, for water canyoning through stone, for the stories that live in red walls and gambel oak going still in evening light. Beauty hollows us out in the most necessary way. And longing — for red dirt and blue canopy sky and star-falling night — is always a story trying to surface through you.

This is what we come to the river for.

What We Will Do:

Over seven days, we gather along the river to sing, listen to story, and enter an embodied mythopoetic writing practice through place, body, memory, and imagination. Fairy tales and myths are the interior architecture of the psyche — maps drawn long before there was language for what they chart. A story is a doorway. Symbol, image, archetype are doorways. The canyon wren’s descending call is a doorway. Blue heron. Screech owl. Petroglyphs. We will use them all.

Through StoryBody writing practice, we enter the old stories with our bodies — tracking myth as kin, writing as animist practice, with the living world as our first and oldest teacher. We learn what it means to willow. To falcon. To river. To canyon. Language doing what it does at its oldest: enacting what it names. Reorganizing something in the body. Speaking the world back into being.

We write scarlet globemallow and canyon wren, the great blue heron lifting off the water in slow holy wingbeat, the red-tail hawk riding thermal above the rim, gambel oak and cottonwood and willow holding the shoreline. We write from petroglyphs — the stories of those who canyoned here before us, pressed into the walls. The stories do not linger. They swell and surge, moving through you the way the river moves through stone: patient, inevitable, shaping as they go.

We layer our voices through song: echo and response, harmony, parts. We speak our writing aloud in the canyon. We witness one another’s emergence. Writing in circle, held by the immensity of the place — that movement becomes medicine.

We (w)rite longing. River. Thread. Labyrinth. Red. We write and sing our stories into the cracks in the sandstone and look up to find the canyon has written back.

The Living World Will Be With Us:
Cottonwood and willow at the water’s edge. Gambel oak going silver in the heat. Scarlet globemallow opening its small flame along the banks. Canyon wren unreeling its song from high in the red walls. Great blue heron — still as a story not yet told — watching from the shallows.

Peregrine falcon and red-tail hawk overhead. Ravens calling across the width of blue. Otters or beaver at dusk. Bighorn sheep on the rim. At night: Utah’s darkest skies over Wingate Sandstone — a cosmology written in light older than any tongue.

In the side canyons: petroglyphs — those who canyoned this same labyrinth before us, carrying their own longing, their own red thread.

What You Will Carry Home:
A story apothecary as a river scroll — days of language gathered from elements, color, creature, stone, movement, myth, and the thread you followed through. You will have retrieved something. Reclaimed something. A voice that was waiting in you the way the canyon wren waits in the red walls: knowing exactly when to sing.
The river shapes. The canyon holds. The stories thread through. The living language you discover here — willowing, rivering, falconing into blue — will stay with you long after the red walls have fallen from sight.

These places return you- inside beauty and longing, red stone and green river, desert and labyrinth.