An Interview with Author Melissa Sevigny

January 26, 2026

Melissa Sevigny with her book Brave the Wild River

Why do humans write? What’s the relationship between writing and the river? What does it mean to write the world? How does one develop a writing practice? Am I a writer? Are we all writers? These were a few of the questions swirling around my mind, like the turbulent water beneath a big rapid, when I sat down with Melissa Sevigny earlier this month.

Melissa is many things. A science communicator, an artist, the award-winning author of Brave the Wild River, a friend, a mentor, and most excitingly, the guest of honor on Holiday’s June 22nd to 26th Yampa Writing Workshop. So, I wanted to learn about how Melissa views writing, rivers, and what’s possible when you bring them together.

Starting with an easy question, I asked “when did you know you were a writer?” Without missing a beat, she replied, “last week?”

Elaborating on this, Melissa explained that while she started writing as a child, “writer” was never a career she imagined she could pursue, because like many people, she got caught up on external benchmarks like publishing or making money. “But the truth is that you’re a writer because you write.” In response, I asked who she hopes to have on this trip.

“We are all writers, storytellers, artists. That’s inherent to human nature, but it gets squashed out of us by this idea of good or bad or right or wrong. On this river trip, we’re throwing that nonsense away, being present, and making beautiful art. I’m excited to form a community in the process. One thing that really helps with writing is having a community of people to create with. Beautiful communities naturally form on river trips, and in writing workshops, and I’m really excited to see what magic happens when we put those two things together.”

Pausing for a moment, she added that “it’s really not a workshop. It won’t be work. The prompts I have are about play, finding joy, experimenting, laughing, discovering, and being in community with each other. No pressure attached. Just a safe and joyful space to explore the Yampa and ourselves and our ability to create art. To do the things that make us human. If you’ve never written anything but a check or a tweet, you’re more than welcome.”

Next, I wanted to better understand how Melissa thinks about writing, and more specifically, writing in/from/about places.

“Growing up in the Sonoran Desert, I fell in love with the feeling of monsoons breaking over the desert, the smell of Creosote, unexpected encounters with animals. I wanted to do something with what I was experiencing, and eventually I realized that writing is how I experience the world. I can’t fully understand what I’m looking at until I write it.”

When I asked about how rivers fit into this, Melissa explained that the “rivers” she knew as a child were almost always dry. But during summer storms, they would come to life, filling with freshwater and captivating the minds of curious kids like her as they wove westward towards the sea. Which eventually made her wonder: where does that water go? And paradoxically, “like a snake eating its own tail, I realized that the water from the mountains around us wound up in the Gila River, which eventually ran to the Colorado River, only to be pumped back to our houses via the Central Arizona Project. So, through the water that fell in our backyard, we were connected to a river far away.”

I asked her to elaborate on why doing a writing workshop on the river was so special, and Melissa explained that during her last trip with Holiday, “there was a wonderful feeling of care. The guides took care of us in many ways, and I think that’s something we all need right now in order to be able to create art. We need to be cared for. That’s a gift; something that’s unique to commercial river trips.”

Then there’s time. Because the reality is that “writing takes time. It’s slow and deliberate and hard to fit into your life because it’s so difficult in today’s world to simply sit down and dedicate time to writing. It’s work that is slow, and it’s hard in a productivity focused world to feel that you can indulge in something like that. So, setting aside dedicated time to write is critical, and going on a river trip with no distractions, in a beautiful place, in a creative context is simply the best way to do that.”

Finally, I wanted to understand why the Yampa, and why right now? This is a historic year for the Colorado River Basin, as continued declines in precipitation across the west, driven in large part by anthropogenic climate change, stress an already over-allocated watershed. In 2026, the legal agreements governing consumption expire, and the seven Colorado River Basin states, Indigenous Peoples, Mexico, and the river itself must negotiate a sustainable path forward. At the heart of it all lies the Yampa, the last unregulated and therefore wild tributary of the Colorado River Basin, still able to speak for itself in the tongue of rivers that are wild and free.

“I wish we could get everyone who lives in this watershed on a river trip. Rivers are so abstract to us, we don’t think about what they mean to our drinking supply and ecology and culture. That all gets buried in modern society, but when you get out on a river, you become acutely aware of it all. It becomes very real and you’re immersed literally and metaphorically in this lifeline of the place where you live. There’s something very special about taking a journey in which the river is in charge. About a journey where you’re just along for the ride.”

Matt rows boats for Holiday in the summer and teaches writing at the University of Utah in the winter. He’s currently a graduate student in the Environmental Humanities program, working on his first book about the future of the Colorado River Basin. If you liked this post, you can follow along with more stuff he’s making here and join him and Melissa this June on the Yampa!