Zion Canyon Mesa
IDEAS RESIDENCIES GATHERINGS
The urgency of our times requires a dynamic response. With a focus on Utah and the American West, Zion Canyon Mesa:
● Supports engaged writers, artists, and other visionaries with residencies at the Mesa, surrounded by Zion National Park
● Facilitates cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural conversations and partnerships to address today's challenges
● Educates by connecting individuals, ZCM residents, students, organizations, and diverse audiences through creative engagement
DUPLEX ONE is now OPEN! Now working on Duplex Two, which will include an artist studio. Soon we will officially open with four residencies, our O.C. Tanner Commons (pictured above right), and a studio. Stay tuned…
UPCOMING EVENTS:
COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS WEEKEND FEBRUARY 21st & 22nd:
Come celebrate our third annual event with Torrey House Press and Zion Forever for a remarkable literary and performance weekend of FREE events, “Creative Tensions: Wild Words and Wild Places,” and “Time Traveler’s Notebook,” both at 7:00 p.m. at the Canyon Community Center, 126 Lion Blvd. in Springdale.
“CREATIVE TENSIONS: WILD WORDS & WILD PLACES,” Friday February 21st: with renowned authors Amy Irvine, Chris La Tray, and Shelley Read. Facilitator and Torrey House Press Co-Executive Director Will Neville-Rehbehn will guide us and this trio of renowned writers through an exploration of place, perspective, and the power of story. “Creative Tensions” is a unique format for collective conversation that encourages openness and inspires empathy as we explore topics that lie at the heart of what it means to be human.
Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn and author of the award-winning memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land and Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness.
Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023–2025. His third book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home was recently announced as a winner of the 2025 Pacific Northwest Book Award.
Shelley Read is an international bestselling novelist whose debut, Go As A River, is translated into thirty-four languages and appears on bestseller lists worldwide.
“TIME TRAVELER’S NOTEBOOK,” Saturday February 22nd: Expanding on their earlier collaborations "Blood River" and "Chaos Theory," musical phenomena Greg Istock and writer par excellence Craig Childs report back on what they discovered during their unintentional quantum entanglement with time itself.
Craig Childs is simply one of America’s finest writers. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau, The Secret Knowledge of Water, Atlas of a Lost World, and Virga & Bone. He is a contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly and his work has appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times.
Greg Istock, composer, producer, dramatist and multi-instrumentalist, fluent in virtually every genre, recently released a solo album “Mr. Jones,” where he plays everything. His band 3Hattrio, voted “Best Band of 2018 in the annual AmericanaUK Readers’ Poll, just finished an album “Come Morning,” in part created while in residency here at Zion Canyon Mesa.
In fact, it was Greg’s freakishly perfect sense of time on an African talking drum, while Craig incanted from a stone tablet he unearthed along the Euphrates River, during this current, perfect alignment of planets, together with a desperate, planetary cry to peer unblinking into our future, that opened this time portal.
"… virtuosic, other-worldly, oddly tuned acoustic guitar fireworks ... a percussive style that creates sonic landscapes so vivid you can practically touch 'em."
- Raleigh-Durham News & Observer
Kate Starling demonstrating plein air, shaded up beneath the O.C. Tanner Commons
PAST EVENTS:
MASTERS ACADEMY of ARTS WORKSHOP with Kate Starling, Ryan Brown and Jacob Collins Oct. 6-10
TE AZUL: Harold Carr on bass, Derek Coombs on keys, Flavia Cervino-Wood on violin in our O.C. Tanner Commons
TE AZUL: original jazz composition performances on September 28th and October 4th in the O.C. Tanner Commons.
March 24-29: Dory Building workshop with the renowned Grand Canyon dory boatbuilding team of Brad Dimock and Cricket. Details at fretwaterboatworks.com.
COLORADO RIVER LECTURE SERIES: Both Events at 7:00 Sprindale Canyon Community Center, 126 Lion Blvd. FREE
March 27: “Wooden Boats on the Colorado: 150 Years of Questionable Endeavor” with Brad Dimock.
Brad didn’t just write three award-winning biographies of Grand Canyon river running pioneers, he built their boats and rowed them down the canyon, with decidedly mixed results. Come hear him talk about it.
April 5: “How the Colorado River is Righting Itself” The Returning Rapids Project with Mike Dehoff
The Returning Rapids Project is a group of river-loving folks based in Moab, Utah. Their project seeks to document the recovery of the Colorado River in Cataract Canyon, Upper Glen Canyon and the San Juan‒areas once inundated by a full, but now receding, Lake Powell reservoir. Check out their remarkble findings in this Rolling Stone article:
Brad Dimock (center, red sweatshirt) and Cricket (front, left) with their finished dory at Lowell Boatworks.
Latest Episodes of the In Site PodcasT:
We are reviving these. We stopped because they worked: they raised almost two million dollars, powering our site construction. THANKS so very much, and your continuing support makes these possible.
Our next podcast will consideration of the remarkable 1986 Great Peace March for Nuclear Disarmament, as remembered during a recent Walker reunion in Ogden, Utah. In the spring of ‘86, 3000 people were left stranded outside of Barstow CA. by a highly publicized but failed effort march effort. Five hundred of these people decided to walk no matter what. Despite having zero funds and no logistical support, they simply started walking east, with remarkable results, including the Soviet-American Walks of 1988-1990. Then we’ll examine the current state of the Rights of Nature, highlighted by the New Zealand parliament’s visionary step to confer legal personhood on their Whanganui River and other ecosystems. THANKS for listening.
past events
Writers' Support for ZCM
Alumni Praise for ZCM
Zion Canyon Mesa is a tax-exempt corporation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
“The Crucible of Friendship:" a conversation between old friends, the novelist / biographer / essayist Judith Freeman the writer / artist Teresa Jordan
LISTEN NOW
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a friend is “one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy. Not ordinarily applied to lovers or relatives…a boon companion.” It first appears in “Beowolf” in 1018 A.D. as “freondum.” Though the opposite of “fiend,” both words root in the same Germanic word soup for “love” and “hate,” so therefore inextricably intertwined.
Here, two old friends, Teresa Jordan and Judith Freeman, both remarkable and accomplished writers and artists, born and bred in the American West, examine their own enduring relationship through the lens of Judith’s latest novel, the incisive, insightful, at times ruthless “MacArthur Park.” The novel’s core finds two older women, both accomplished writers and artists, born and bred in the American West, attempting to re-kindle their lifelong friendship after intimate convolutions blew them apart. Spoiler alert: marrying the same man may become a problem. No, not Teresa and Judith; her characters Verna and Jolene as they road trip across the West towards some notion of their shared childhood. What destroys friendships? Can good intentions alone heal those implosive moments of toxic intimacy almost inevitable in friendships? Who here has not lost a friend?