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.