Most writing conferences begin in a hotel ballroom with a name tag and a bad cup of coffee. This one begins on a train platform in downtown Albuquerque, at 11:32 in the morning, with the Southwest Chief idling and three hours of open track ahead.
Tracks & Tales: A New Mexico Storyathon runs October 23 through 25, 2026, and it is capped at eighteen people. That number is not a marketing flourish. It is roughly the size of a good workshop, the size of a train car's worth of strangers who will spend a weekend becoming writers together. The event is the invention of Sonja Dewing, a New Mexico author and writing coach who has spent years running a program she calls the Short Storyathon — a fast, hands-on workshop built on a blunt promise: become a published author in a single weekend. Her Short Storyathons have run virtually, guiding participants from idea generation on a Friday night to hitting "publish" on Amazon by Sunday. Tracks & Tales is that same engine, moved onto rails.
The itinerary is the argument. On Friday morning, participants board Amtrak's Southwest Chief at the Alvarado Transportation Center at 100 First Street SW, a multimodal transit hub named for the grand Alvarado Hotel that once stood on that corner. The roughly three-hour ride north to Las Vegas, New Mexico, is not dead time to be endured; it is the first writing sprint. Passengers are meant to brainstorm, journal, and watch the high desert plateaus and open country of Northern New Mexico slide past the window — landscape that, as the event's own description puts it, has inspired storytellers for generations. The Southwest Chief is routinely counted among the most scenic long-distance routes in the country, running between Chicago and Los Angeles, and the New Mexico stretch is a large part of why.
Then the train stops, and the weekend's second act begins literally at the foot of the stairs. The Castañeda Hotel sits trackside in Las Vegas. Built in 1898, it was Fred Harvey's first trackside hotel — the opening move in what became an American hospitality empire. The hotel's architect, Frederick Roehrig, designed it in Mission Revival style; it became the earliest Harvey House built in that mode and the prototype for nearly everything Harvey built afterward. It is roughly 30,000 square feet, with a 500-foot arcade wrapping the east facade and courtyard, a basement under the north wing for kitchen supplies and another under the south wing for boilers, and a vast, never-insulated attic that went unused.
The Harvey story has a thread that runs straight through this event. Fred Harvey was the first major American company to hire vast numbers of women — eventually more than 100,000 of them. The Harvey Girls who staffed the Castañeda's dining room lived across Railroad Avenue in the Rawlings Building, which served as their dormitory and has since been restored. The hotel's twenty-two rooms, each decorated with Victorian antiques and named for an animal or a Fred Harvey historic site, are where the Storyathon's writers will sleep.
There is a further piece of symmetry that the organizers could hardly have engineered better. The Castañeda was successful enough that in 1902 the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe built the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque on its design — the very building whose name now attaches to the transportation center where this trip departs. The Alvarado was demolished in 1970, a loss so keenly felt that it is credited with sparking the historic preservation movement in New Mexico. The Castañeda, meanwhile, survived — mostly abandoned and crumbling for decades — until Allan Affeldt and his wife, the artist Tina Mion, took it on and reopened it in 2019. So the weekend's route runs from the site of a lost Harvey hotel to the oldest surviving one, restored. Writers boarding in Albuquerque are, in a sense, traveling backward into the building that Albuquerque no longer has.
Saturday is the working day. Morning writing sprints and hourly check-ins keep participants moving; midday sessions cover book cover design, either do-it-yourself in Canva or working with a professional artist; the afternoon brings peer review and revision. The weekend closes on Sunday, with the group departing Las Vegas at 3 p.m. — the event's published end time — and the promise, per the Short Storyathon model, of a finished, polished short story and the know-how to put it on Amazon. Dewing's past Short Storyathon attendees have included first-time authors who ranked at the top of their genres, and the workshop's ticket has traditionally included professional editing of the first three pages.
The price is $731.82, which is the number that will decide most people's answer. It is not a conference fee in the ordinary sense; it is a weekend of lodging in a restored 1898 landmark, rail travel both ways, and instruction, bundled. Eighteen tickets means eighteen beds in a twenty-two-room hotel, which is to say the capacity is set by the building, not by ambition. Anyone who has tried to book a room at the Castañeda on a fall weekend in northern New Mexico will recognize the arithmetic.
What the event is really selling, though, is harder to itemize. Rail travel has a particular hold on American writers — the observation car, the enforced idleness, the sense of a story assembling itself at speed. Fred Harvey understood something similar more than a century ago: that a train journey is improved by a beautiful place to stop, and that the stopping place can become the reason for the journey. Tracks & Tales takes that old bargain and adds a workshop to it. Eighteen people will get on a train in Albuquerque on a Friday morning in October. Three hours later they will step off in front of a hotel that has been waiting for them since 1898, and they will be expected to have something to show for it by Sunday afternoon.