Orion magazine hosts regular Online Environmental Writers’ Workshops in poetry and nonfiction. This unique opportunity lets you improve your writing skills and build community from home. Connect with us for six to eight sessions with an experienced instructor and writer. Learn more about environmental writing, and renew, illuminate, and deepen your relationship with nature and place.

Conducted over Zoom (or similar platform) and limited to twelve participants, the workshops will feature a combination of generative exercises, craft talks, readings, special guest appearances, and workshopping of student manuscripts. Please read individual course descriptions for more specifics as each course is different. While individual workshops vary, students can likely expect to spend a few hours a week reading, writing, and commenting on work in and outside of class

We also offer an additional hour-long private group Zoom Q&A session with Orion's editor-in-chief Tajja Isen. This will occur outside your normal class meeting time at a time and date TBD, for no additional charge. It will be a time to peek behind the curtain and ask any general questions you might have about pitching, writing, publishing, and Orion.  

The course: Bel Canto: Writing the Lyric Essay

The term limit implies a boundary that cannot be breached, but deep in its etymology, the word bends and bows. The restriction relents. The furthest point opens and ushers us into something new. In this class, we will sing the liminal spaces. The thresholds. Atwood’s places “of caught breath." 

Throughout our generative workshop, participants will read, discuss, and write the lyric essay. Together, we will walk the highline between poetry and prose. We will become students of musicality and revelation. Reading shall compass critical and craft essays, alongside hallmarks of the genre. Across these pages, we will trace, among others, the applications of associative logic, white space, research, syntax, and lyric time. Representative authors may include Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, Maggie Nelson, Lia Purpura, Ocean Vuong, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Anne Carson.

The course will also offer a variety of writing prompts along the way to supplement works-in-progress or spark new projects. The exercises will take students through their formal paces to yield braided, hermit crab, flash, collage, and other types of hybrid narrative. All participants will have the opportunity to workshop one full-length lyric essay and schedule a 30-minute individual consultation with the instructor.

Duration: This online course meets across eight consecutive Sundays from 3-5 pm ET (12-2 pm PT), beginning on July 5th and concluding on August 23rd.

Application deadline: Apply by June 20th.

The Instructor: Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams received the 2013 Whiting Writers Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress The Following Sea. She has been further supported by a Rona Jaffe National Literary Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Orion, the Oxford American, StoryQuarterly, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Abrams currently teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Tuition

This Zoom course is available for $600. Payment within five days of acceptance will guarantee your spot. Cancelations up until a week before the start of the course will result in a full refund. After that, refunds will be conditional on our ability to fill your spot before the course begins. 

How to Apply

These workshops may be competitive. Please send a cover letter and up to 1500 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poems.  Sample writing can be published or unpublished, and might, but probably will not be used in class. Applicants will be notified whether they have been admitted within a week of the application deadline.

Questions? Contact workshops@orionmagazine.org or check out our Help Center or FAQs.