EWU creative writing students explore Yellowstone's 'wildness' with wolves and words

In professor Jonathan Johnson's creative writing classes at Eastern Washington University, students receive feedback and constructive criticism to improve their writing and creative ventures.

But one of his classes moves students away from this constant analysis and frees them from the self-consciousness of the classroom, he said.

Every summer, Johnson takes a group of students - predominantly English and creative writing majors - to Yellowstone National Park, where the students observe wolves in their natural state and take advantage of the otherworldly landscapes to inspire their writing.

At the end of the trip, Johnson doesn't expect the eight students he brought with him to turn in polished work, but instead he asks them to fill 40 to 50 pages of a notebook with whatever comes to their brain during the seven-day trip they took in mid-June.

"What I so-called 'grade' them on is just ink," Johnson said, explaining the requirement is to write for themselves.

He only reads the work the students decide they want him to read once the class is over. Both graduate and undergraduate students are allowed to join the trip.

The trip is based around watching wolves exist naturally in the park. Johnson said in the 20 years he's led the trip, he's ensured every student sees a wolf - whether from close up or from afar.

The students said one of the most special parts of the trip was helping kids and typical park visitors look through their scopes to see the wolves in the distance.

Graduate fiction student Elsa Cruz said at one point the students were able to help a little girl decked out in wolf gear see the canines through the scope.

"It's gonna change their life to see a wolf in the wild, to see how beautiful it is, and it's going to change their whole philosophy about conservation and about protecting wild places and wild species," Cruz said.

Like the young children looking on, Cruz said the experience changed her too.

For Harvey Anderson, a master's poetry student, writer's block doesn't exist in Yellowstone National Park. That's why she chose to go on the trip for a second time after going once before as an undergraduate at EWU.

Even if Anderson isn't writing specifically about the wild lands she's looking at, she said she lets the scenery inspire her. At Trout Lake, she said she watched the fish jump in and out of the water and let her brain wander.

"I would think of, OK, well, trout - what do they look like? What does that make me think of?" Anderson said. "Then I wrote something about my childhood, so I think I use nature and then I kind of use it to inspire something that, like, associatively makes me think of something else."

Zach Roush, a graduate student studying fiction, said the theme of wildness continued to come up in his writing during the trip. He's currently working on a dystopian novella about teenagers on a road journey.

"Being around the wildness and being around the wolves and good people just helped me percolate on themes that I like and helped me write a pretty large section that takes place in a Yellowstone setting," Roush said of his novella .

This year, the course is partially funded by the recently created Youngs Endowment for National Park Studies, started by EWU professor Bill Youngs, an expert on national parks history and guest professor on the Yellowstone trip.

The $5,000 grant cut the costs each student paid in half and was one of the first awards given out by the endowment, which Youngs said intends to support travel for students studying the parks, expenses for books, uniforms and licenses needed for park-related jobs and money for guest experts and award prizes.

Rather than limiting the endowment to national park history, Youngs said the "studies" part of the name is important to him because he wants the grant to be used for a variety of interdisciplinary purposes.

"I just decided, really it's not just history," Youngs said. "It's all sorts of fields, so these are set up so you can put in a grant request, and as long as it has something to do with national parks or even state parks - it's kind of broadly defined - you can be eligible for a grant."

Last year, an EWU music professor took students into the Grand Tetons using the grant, and a similar trip to Olympic National Park is planned for September. Like the Yellowstone trip, about half of the trip costs will be covered for students on the Olympic trip because of the endowment.

Cruz said before the trip began, her plan was to try to write from different animal's perspectives, including the wolves. When she tried to write, though, she was struck with the difficulty of her idea.

"I started trying to write them, and it was like, no, I can't do this," Cruz said. "I have no idea what they're thinking. I can't try to assume that. They are just such this like crazy wild creature that I have no business trying to get in their minds, you know?"

Instead, Cruz let her fascination with the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of the park inspire her. She said she was shocked by how personal both her writing and her conversations with Johnson and other students became.

"Something about the wild just breaks you open, and you're like, oh, I'm thinking about my life and my whole future and everything," Cruz said.

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.