Don’t miss Brian Bouldrey’s provocative one-week class where you’ll explore how to banish clichés and discover refreshing new approaches to nature and environmental writing. This class is open to all who have one nature-writing sample to share in the workshop. A great cross-genre experience with discussions of environmental poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.
Environmental Writing
January 30 – February 3, 2012
Class Size: 15
$500
Level: 1-week Intensive
Click here to apply for this workshop
There are subgenres of creative nonfiction based on form (familiar essay, memoir), and there are those labeled according to subject (travel, science, food, cultural criticism). With these subject matters often come expectations that can become traps, and even clichés—why, for instance, when we read or write about nature and the environment, does God more often than not show up, all spendthrift and uplifting? Why the spiritual epiphany?
This course will look at the traps of mode. While we will always honor Dillard and Thoreau, there are other ways of looking at nature. Have you seen “Randall’s” take on the honey badger, for example? We will look at a variety of texts and video essays that examine and limn nature with other modes, through the eyes of other cultures and other times, in order to free and refresh our writing on nature, the environment, with the intent to banish all the other mode clichés of subject-based creative nonfiction. Readings may include Ruskin, Tanizaki, Joy Williams, A.D. Hope, Coetzee, Marilynn Robinson, Teddy Roosevelt, and video essays by Isabella Rossellini (The Green Porn series) and the notorious Randall. Each day we will write to prompt exercises. Students should have one example of nature or environmental writing to discuss in online workshop.
Brian Bouldrey, is the author, most recently, of The Sorrow of the Elves (GemmaMedia, 2011). He has written three nonfiction books: Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica (University of Wisconsin Press, September 2007), Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books), and The Autobiography Box (Chronicle Books); three novels, The Genius of Desire (Ballantine), Love, the Magician (Harrington Park), and The Boom Economy (University of Wisconsin Press), and he is the editor of several anthologies. He is recipient of Fellowships from Yaddo and Eastern Frontier Society, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Western Regional Magazine Award. He is the North American Editor of the Open Door literacy series for GemmaMedia. He teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and literature at Northwestern University.