Write Your Story
Presented by the Leopold Writing Program in partnership with the Santa Fe International Literary Festival
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WRITE YOUR STORY We hope that you're enjoying the 2025 Santa Fe International Literary Festival and feeling inspired and enriched. It is a gift to be able to experience the leading writers of our day and to be reminded that writing is for everyone. Partnering with the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, the Leopold Writing Program invites you to reflect on quotes from the featured festival writers. Share your initial thoughts with other Festival guests or express your extended thoughts on our website, continuing the conversation about our relationship with the natural world. Click the prompts below to share your thoughts, musings, poetry, and stories. |
LEOPOLD WRITING CONTEST Modeled after our Leopold Writing Contest, we invite you to respond to the quotes and prompts on this webpage. Scroll to the bottom of this page or click below to learn more about this year's water-themed Leopold Writing Contest. |
Submissions will remain open through June 15. Responses will be compiled into a digital booklet of essays, short stories, and poems. Sign up for our newsletter to receive a copy in your inbox.
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Terry Tempest Williams
“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find... To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World |
Michael Pollan
“Sometimes the best way to show your respect for something is to just leave it alone.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants |
Deborah Jackson Taffa
“My Laguna grandmother, Esther, is the one who taught me that a deep intimacy with a homeland requires three things: sensory experiences of particular geographies, a storied history of the trails, and a deep caring about them.”
― Deborah Jackson Taffa, Whiskey Tender |
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Danzy Senna
“It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.”
― Danzy Senna, Colored Television |
Amy Tan
“I, too, am part of [the baby titmice's] curricula. The young birds have always seen me as part of the yard. I am the flightless animal that sits by the big glass doors and sometimes comes out. They associate me with the arrival of mealworms and make loud tsika-tsika sounds before I’ve even refilled the feeders... At first, they waited for me to leave before jumping down and entering the cages. But some are now acclimated to my presence and enter when I am still refilling the bowls.”
― Amy Tan, The Backyard Bird Chronicles |
Percival Everett
“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them.”
― Percival Everett, James |
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Gabrielle Zevin
“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.” ― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry |
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Ramona Emerson
“Grandma always said to me that you never do things for people to get something in return. That is the white man’s way of living. You do it because they need you. You do it because if you don’t, no one else will.”
― Ramona Emerson, Shutter |
Marie Arana
“Indeed, although we arrived long before the pilgrims—and although we account for more than half of the US population growth over the last decade and are projected to lead population growth for the next thirty-five years—it seems as if the rest of the country is perpetually in the act of discovering us.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority |
Colum McCann
“I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.”
― Colum McCann |
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Cristina Rivera Garza
“This form of writing wasn't about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrom |
Viet Thanh Nguyen
“In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories. Isn't that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees |
Miranda July
“But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising.”
― Miranda July, All Fours |
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Chris Rainier
“We need to take a moment now and then to trade stories about what it really means to be a human being.”
― Chris Rainier |
Jonathan Eig
“Using a Greek word from the New Testament that theologians often employed, King referred to that loving spirit as agape, a love that offered understanding and goodwill to all, a force that made no distinction between friends and enemies, that encouraged love of everyone because God loved everyone. Agape, he said, offered the kind of power to fuel a nonviolent movement for justice.”
― Jonathan Eig, King |
Leopold Writing Contest |
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Each year, the Aldo Leopold Writing Contest invites New Mexico students in Grades 6-12 to submit essays in response to a carefully-crafted and thought-provoking prompt inspired by the writings of Aldo Leopold. Encouraged by their teachers, students delve into his philosophies of land stewardship, especially as set forth in A Sand County Almanac, and explore the relevance of Leopold's classic and timeless observations to issues that they experience personally, locally, and globally. The Writing Contest is divided into three Categories: Grades 6-7, Grades 8-9, and Grades 10-12. |
A panel of volunteer judges evaluates each essay in these categories for responsiveness to the prompt, eloquence of expression, writing skill and language usage, and connection to Leopold's "land ethic." Judges choose First Place essayists in each of the three categories, as well as Honorable Mentions as merited. Each student winner receives a cash award and certificate.
Since its beginning in 2009, over 3,000 students from schools in rural and urban communities around New Mexico have taken part in the annual Aldo Leopold Writing Contest. |
This Year's Essay Topic
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Aldo Leopold is most widely known as the author of A Sand County Almanac (1949) in which he articulates his land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Today, we can look to Leopold’s writing to help guide us in addressing changing realities brought about by climate change, biodiversity loss, growing demand for fresh water, and other global environmental issues. In his essay “Song of the [Río] Gavilan” in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold writes: |
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“This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it ... you must know the speech of hills and rivers …
Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”
Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.”
Essay Prompt
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Write about the song or melody that you hear in a body of water (such as a stream, river, lake, acequia, ocean, etc.) and what you would answer back.
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Click below to read the winning essays. |
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The Aldo Leopold Writing Contest Awards are presented each year to a distinguished group of young essayists from around the state of New Mexico. These inspiring young men and women are the reification of our environmental hopes. I urge you to support the program that now lets them flourish. "Lopez's was one of the most intelligent, informed and urgent voices over the past 40 years calling us to repent of our destruction and devastation of the earth, an impassioned, poetic plea for us to come to our senses."
—The Salt Lake Tribune |
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