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KVNF's weekly call-in gardening show. As the Worm Turns is now on Wednesday's @ 5 PM.

Life will always contain ups and downs. I often think about it like a trail through the mountains. You can't always be on a mountain top. You have to come back down and spend some time in the valley before you can go back up again.

When I was 18 and first worked as a river guide, I assumed I had to be as tough — or even tougher — than the guys I worked with.It was the early 2000s, when few women were guiding. Though I loved being on the river, I often felt isolated, thinking I had to work harder than anyone else to be taken seriously. I believed that in part because I didn’t know the stories of women who had come before me.Little by little, I began to hear about Georgie White, the first female guide on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. She started Georgie’s Royal River Rats in the early 1950s and made a name for herself running huge motorboats — stocked with Coors and manned exclusively by Los Angeles firemen. Her trips were known to be raucous and so were her outfits, leopard prints preferred. But the stories sometimes made her seem more like a caricature, a wild and outrageous woman.

In my classes and sessions I often get the question "Does this get easier?" I find that people are asking this about two different topics. One is about life - "Does mindfulness make life easier?" and two - "Does practicing mindfulness and being mindfully present, get easier?" The Answe to bor is yes, with explaination of course. We'll talk about the first topic today.

We all tell stories of how ourselves, others or the world should or should not be. When we look at the energy behind these shoulds, we find a lot of judgment. These shoulds compare an ideal image or perception to what reality is and we often perceive the actual reality as being less desired.

KVNF's weekly call-in gardening show. As the Worm Turns is now on Wednesday's @ 5 PM.

“My writing often comes to me that way–something that interests me in the real life world, something kind of political and thorny, something I don’t entirely totally know how I think about it, something I’m interested in exploring.” These words from short story writer and novelist Claire Boyles are at the heart of this episode on the relationship between fiction and real life. How might having personal experience in a certain arena both help and hinder our ability to use it as material for fiction? How can characters drive the way opinions are explored in a book? How do we create more compelling characters? What must be let go as we create a fictional realm? How can fiction help us explore “thorny” political themes? And how might our past lives help us in practical ways as we move forward in our creative lives?Claire Boyles (she/her) is a writer and former farmer. Her debut novel, Appraisals, is forthcoming in August 2026. A 2022 Whiting Award winner in fiction, she is the author of Site Fidelity, which won the High Plains Book Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Reading the West Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Sierra Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals, and she is a screenwriter with multiple credits on the Hallmark Channel. She splits time between Loveland, Colorado and Ames, Iowa, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and the Environment at Iowa State University.Claire will be a speaker at the Grand Mesa Writer’s Symposium in Cedaredge on September 12. Details here: https://www.grandmesawriters.org/schedule

Colorado is home to several International DarkSky Places, including Paonia right here in the KVNF’s listening area. Naturita, Nucla, and Norwood are part of that growing statewide commitment to preserving natural darkness – and along the Unaweep Tabeguache Scenic & Historic Byway, that commitment becomes visible the moment the sun goes down. If you’ve ever traveled the UTB, you know it’s more than a road. It’s a 133mile ribbon of canyoncountry, redrock walls, winding rivers, and quiet mesas. Highway 141 and 145 carry you through landscapes shaped by deep time - and when night falls, that landscape expands upward. The sky becomes part of the scenery.

“Make this your worst draft.” That’s what Craig Childs will often say to students when they first sit down to write. “We’re creating stuff out of nowhere, so we’re lucky to get a word down on a page. We’re exploring options.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with the popular creative non-fiction author about his own unusual path to a writing career. Our conversation includes:How to invite intuition and surprise into your writing,How teaching writing changes and enhances our understanding of our own process,How a thesaurus, used unconventionally, can be a great tool for when you’re stuck,Creative ways to take words from a page and bring them to life,And how a journaling practice helps inform a writing practice.Craig will be a keynote speaker at the 2026 Grand Mesa Writers’s Symposium in Cedaredge on September 11-13.CRAIG CHILDS is an explorer who brings tales of deserts and ice caps to the page. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including The Secret Knowledge of Water, Atlas of a Lost World, Stone Desert, Virga & Bone, Tracing Time, and The Wild Dark. His books have won numerous honors including the Reading the West Book Award, Southwest Book of the Year, a Foreword INDIES medal, and the Orion Book Award. His nonfiction narratives and journalism have appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, High Country News, The New York Times, The Sun, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Radiolab. He blogs at Last Word On Nothing. Childs lives in southwest Colorado.

I drove to the bluff overlooking the “Gunny” to process the sad news — news that hasn’t yet been made official — that by October a big portion of the lower Gunnison River in western Colorado will be dry. The official term is “fully dewatered.”Monsoons were supposed to be heavy this year. As I looked down at the river in late August, clouds in the distance appeared almost monsoonal. Wisps of rain streamed out, but they evaporated before reaching the parched ground. It just about made me cry.Below me, the North Fork of the Gunnison unceremoniously trickled into the Gunnison River at a place known as Pleasure Park, a weather-beaten outpost of civilization that’s one of the last best-kept secrets in Colorado.