VIRTUAL: Writing the Wild: A One Week Virtual Eco-Poetry Generative Writing Intensive
Tuesday, February 2
Thursday, February 4
Saturday – February 6
This workshop is limited to 12 participants. Register now!
Drawing inspiration from the colossal beauty of the natural world, Writing the Wild focuses on writing nature/eco/eco justice poems with a view to publication. Taught by award-winning poet and editor, Pam Uschuk, this course meets for 4 days, 1.5 hours each day, every other day for one week.
This class explores how diverse writers use their observations about and interactions/interconnection with the wild natural world to fuel-inject and enliven their poems. Emphasis is on technique as well as on a spiritual connection to land. Among the poets studied are Linda Hogan, WS Merwin, Joy Harjo, Drew Lanham, Camille Dungy, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, Leslie Marmon Silko, etc.
As well as reading and discussing poems, participants actively write. Writing prompts and written feedback on work generated in the intensive are provided by the instructor.
Everyone is encouraged to keep a daily nature journal in which they record bird and animal sightings, plant identifications, Climate Change effects on weather, observations of their walks in the natural world. The final class is devoted to discussing how and where to get work published. Participants can expect to to generate 5-8 finished poems.
TEXTS: Orion Magazine, Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts, terrain.org,, Ecotone, Dwellings by Linda Hogan, Ecopoetry, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth, Black Nature, edited by Camille Dungy, Ghost Fishing, edited by Melissa Tuckey, and The Norton Anthology of Indigenous Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo, Jennifer Forester and LeAnne Howe.
Instructors
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Pam UschukPolitical activist and wilderness advocate Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including “Crazy Love,” winner of a 2010 American Book Award, “Finding Peaches In The Desert” (Tucson/Pima Literaature Award), “Blood Flower, Wings Press,” one of Book List’s 2015 Notable Books. Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including “Poetry,” “Ploughshares,” “Agni Review,” “Parnassus Review,” etc.
Among her awards are the War Poetry Prize from winningwriers.com, New Millenium Poetry Prize, Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and Amnesty International.
Editor-In-Chief of “Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts,” Uschuk lives in Tucson, Arizona with her husband, first Tucson Poet Laureate William Pitt Root. She edited the anthology, “Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017.” Other editing projects include the in-progress, “Contemporary Chicanx Writers Anthology,” co-sponsored by Cutthroat and The Black Earth Institute.