T178.
Urgent Wonder: The Practice & Paradox of Teaching Environmental Writing
Thursday, March 24, 2022
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
Teaching environmental writing is critical, rewarding, and often overwhelming. How can we urge students to express deep-felt awe for the natural world and address urgent ecological crises? How can we nurture creativity, offer solace, and spur action? How can we decolonize nature writing tropes? As writers, how do we strike the balance of wonder and terror ourselves? In this panel, we grapple with these questions and share practical approaches for the classroom and beyond.
Participants
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of several books of creative nonfiction including Uplake and Reclaimers and the poetry chapbook, Mile Marker Six. A four-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award, she is currently Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University.
Laura Pritchett is an author and a conservationist. She is the author of The Blue Hour; Red Lightning; Stars Go Blue; Sky Bridge; Hell's Bottom, Colorado; and several books of nonfiction. More at www.laurapritchett.com
Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster; Sustainability: A Love Story; Egg; Microcosm; Quench Your Thirst with Salt; and This Noisy Egg. She edited, with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. She teaches at Northern Arizona University.
Derek Sheffield's collection, Not for Luck, was selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. He is the poetry editor of Terrain.org and a coeditor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and Cascadia: A Field Guide through Art, Ecology, and Poetry.
CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and coeditor of Native Voices. Cmarie is director of Elk River Writers Workshop and faculty in the graduate program in creative writing at Western Colorado University.
