ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
Traditional nature and travel writing is often marred with white-settler mentality focusing on narratives of exploration and consumption of nature. Nature is often romanticized as a sanctuary and a place to escape from urban life or a resource to exploit for benefit.
The Embodied Nature Writing Workshop provides a curated and guided space for diverse and inclusive anti-colonial nature writing practices. Through challenging traditional norms of nature writing, this workshop asks participants to experience nature through their own personal histories and positionalities and respond creatively to the environment around them. The workshop encourages writing the nature through embodied, personal experiences, diverse histories, and backgrounds and is catered towards participants of color, immigrant, queer and underprivileged groups.
During each session, we will read from a diverse selection of Indigenous, BIPOC, and queer nature writers and through writing prompts, find and develop our unique voices and connections with nature. The interactive workshop will also include sharing and discussing observations and peer feedback.
[Photo: Quail Hill Trail, Irvine, CA]
An Other Poem
surely I am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
and the waters lean against the
chesapeake shore like a familiar
poems about nature and landscape
surely but whenever I begin
“the trees wave their knotted branches
and…” why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?
— Lucille Clifton, “surely I am able to write poems”
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ENW was made possible by grants from the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts’ Medici Circle and the 21C Arts Research and Innovation Grant
Embodied nature writing workshop 