​Write Your Story
Presented by the Leopold Writing Program in partnership with the Santa Fe International Literary Festival

WRITE YOUR STORY
We hope you are enjoying the 2026 Santa Fe International Literary Festival and feeling inspired. It’s a gift to experience leading writers of our time and to be reminded that writing belongs to everyone.

The Leopold Writing Program and the Santa Fe International Literary Festival invite 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 the Leopold Writing Contest, we invite you to respond to the quotes and prompts on this webpage.​
​
Click below to learn more about the Leopold Writing Contest.
​

Visit the Writing Contest Webpage here

Return to the Santa Fe International Literary Festival website here

Submissions will remain open through June 1. 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.

The 2025 digital booklet can be access here.

---

Isabel Wilkerson

“We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.”
​― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Carl Hiaasen

"Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed."
― Carl Hiaasen

Alison Bechdel

“It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive."
― Alison Bechdel

When have you realized you were “choosing ignorance” about something important? What changed your perspective?

What kinds of injustices make you feel the most anger? Why those?

How does self-awareness shape your decisions, for better or worse?

---

Jason De Leon

“Human smuggling is exploitative and violent. It also cannot be stopped. But it is not the problem. The monstrous injustices created by capitalism that drive migration are the problem."
― Jason De Leon, Soldiers and Kings

Maria Semple

"There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator."
― Maria Semple

Priyanka Kumar

“Love makes memories. Hate makes regrets"
― Priyanka Kumar

What would a world system free from the destructive forces of capitalism look like? How do you imagine migration would exist in that world?

When have you realized your own perspective might be unreliable?

How do your emotional experiences shape how you remember places?

---

Kiese Laymon

“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth."
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir

Ada Limón

“I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, walk through."
― Ada Limón, Sharks in the Rivers

Ocean Vuong

“It is said that grief is actually love - but with nowhere to go.”
― Ocean Vuong

What’s the difference between telling your truth and actually discovering the truth?

What “threshold moments” have shaped your relationship with the world around you?

How do you experience grief—as absence, love, or something else?

---

James McBride

“Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.”
― James McBride, The Color of Water

Colm Tóibín

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
― Colm Tóibín

Susan Orlean

“Writing always feels new because you never build equity. Every sentence is a slippery invention."
― Susan Orlean, Joyride: A Memoir

When has truth felt difficult to pin down in your life?

Write, or describe a piece about a landscape using musical or poetic language instead of straightforward description.

What feels like a daily invention for you?

---

Lauren Groff

“But now she sensed the earth under her in its spin and knew herself to be a piece of it, necessary and large enough."
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

Brandon Hobson

Rebecca Solnit

“He wants to believe in the kindness of strangers, the fierce possibilities of hope, the beauty of color.”
― Brandon Hobson, Forty Stories

“Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

What helps you feel grounded or part of the world?

How do small moments of beauty affect your outlook?

What role does joy play in your motivation to act or care about issues?

---

Sarah Weinman

“The appreciation of art can make a sucker out of those who forget the darkness of real life.”
― Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

Judy Blume

“Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me"
― Judy Blume

Peter Stark

"Lost is not a failure. It is a skill. Americans have always discovered themselves by pushing beyond the edge of the map.” 
― Peter Stark, “Last Empty Places” Podcast

How has appreciating or making art enabled you to see beyond the darkness of real life?

How has reading shaped who you are today?

What have you discovered about yourself in a time when you felt lost: geographically, spiritually, or otherwise?

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.
​
​- Barry Lopez, National Book Award Winner

"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