Free River Press

Free River Press is a non-profit educational corporation. Its mission is to provide a platform from which ordinary Americans may document the rapidly changing nature of their society. This is done through Free River Press writing workshops, seminars, publications, and regional development projects that it leads in collaboration with community groups, universities, and other non-profits.

For the past fifteen years Free River Press director Robert Wolf has been organizing writing workshops in cities and rural hamlets, in farmhouse dining rooms, church basements, schools, libraries, and colleges. Begun in 1989 with a workshop for the homeless in Nashville, Tennessee, Free River Press has since worked with people from all walks of life. Its goal is to amass a body of writing that someday will resemble a collective autobiography of America.

Free River Press depends on a network of volunteers in New York, Chicago, Iowa, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and New Mexico. Beginning with chapbooks written by Nashville homeless and Iowa farmers, Free River Press has since conducted workshops in Arkansas and west Tennessee, documenting life in the Mississippi Delta among the rural poor. Most recently the press's Urban Writers Workshop has been developing stories in New York City and New Jersey.

The Free River Press writing workshop was designed with the amateur in mind. Its secret lies in the fact that it is orally oriented, which in practice means that participants tell their stories before writing them. They are then asked to write their stories as closely as possible to the way they told them. This helps the writing process while giving it authority. The workshop method presupposes that we share an intuitive wisdom about storytelling.