Nature Writing
$360
Throughout this six week course, students will look at the many ways in which humans are connected to our natural surroundings, both urban and remote. Weather, soil, plants, wildlife, changing systems, and more will all be explored. By delving into the inherent close relationship humans have with our natural world, each student’s path to writing their own stories using the natural world as scaffolding will emerge.
Each lesson will be designed to unlock the storyteller within by encouraging observation, reading, and learning about natural systems. Participants will read various forms of nature prose and poetry including work by Mary Oliver, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barbara Kingsolver, Merlin Sheldrake, Richard Powers, Robert Macfarlane, and more. These readings and the resulting discussions will then serve as a springboard to developing personal tone and style.
Through guided in-class exercises students will work to develop their own narrative voice. Each step in the course will hone in on students’ unique narrative perspectives that reflects their own personal connections to the natural world.
The in-class writing prompts will often draw on lived experiences and are intended to help students find their voice. Whether it’s remembering a favorite hike, gardening in their own backyard, watching a bird from their apartment window, cloud watching, traveling further afield into the wilderness, swimming, or walking a creek path, students will have opportunities to use memory to capture the feeling of decompressing in nature in words. Students will explore various forms and literary devices and styles in the process. Students will then have the opportunity to share these free-writes in class to get feedback from peers and the instructor.
By reading the greats and engaging with the natural world from a personal standpoint, students will develop their understanding of ecology and our human connection to it as a species. By the end of the course, acknowledging human interconnectivity with nature may very well become an inherent part of students’ writing process.
This course invites students to dig deep, observe the world around them, slow down, bask in the beauty of the PNW, and discover how their own unique stories can spring from nature.
Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.
Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.
Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.
Apply here for the liaison position.
Emily Strelow
Emily Strelow has an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Washington in Seattle and an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science. Her debut novel, The Wild Birds, was published March of 2018 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Foreword Indies Award. Emily was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley but has lived all over the West. For the last fifteen years she combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology. While doing field jobs she camped and wrote in remote areas in the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother of two boys, naturalist, conservation storyteller, and author living in Portland, Oregon.
