You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and welcome today to Bookworm. My guests are William

Kittridge and Onik Smith. They are here from the Yellow Bay Writers Workshop. This is the ninth

annual Yellow Bay Writers Workshop, and I thought it was the right time of year to start to talk about

writing workshops, which is something we've never done on Bookworm. You know, every year around

summertime, people start seeing the various literary magazines and writers' magazines they

subscribe to word of summer workshops around the country. All sorts of people travel for a week,

usually, to another place where professional writers are willing to critique your work. There are

sometimes agents and editors there. There are many choices that people make, But I personally have visited the Yellow Bay Riders Workshop,

and it's a place that I like being.

First off, it's very beautiful.

Could you tell a little bit about the environment?

This is O'Neck Smith,

the creative director of the Yellow Bay Riders Workshop.

Well, Yellow Bay is sort of the ideal summer camp workshop in a way.

It's situated on Flathead Lake, which is this beautiful, pristine lake in the Rocky Mountains,

near Glacier Park, north of Missoula and south of Callisville.

And it is a working biological field station of the University of Montana, so there's somehow

real work and real important work that goes on there, which informs, I think, the sense

...