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

The course: Wild, Messy, Bold: Kickstart your Writing Project with Katrina Vandenberg

In this active writing circle, writers will make significant progress in creating a wild, messy, bold, exploratory draft of a creative project. Along the way, we will meet weekly to offer accountability and encouragement, and learn more about how the creative process works, and how to harness it to make it best work for you. We will note the exhilaration and perils to be found in the early stages of a project, and do exercises designed to spark possibility and a sense of play. Sharing of early work will be nonjudgmental, focusing on helping each other see the most engaging parts of our drafts, and pointing the way towards future exploration. This course would be a good fit for anyone who wants to develop momentum on a new or dormant project (or in general), create or sharpen a writing practice, and make 2027 the year you focus on your writing. This class is especially for nonfiction writers, poets, or writers whose work falls somewhere between.

Duration: This online course meets across eight consecutive Mondays from 7-9pm ET (4-6 PT) from January 4 through February 22.

Application window: November 1-15 The instructor: Katrina Vandenberg is the author of two books of poems, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World and Atlas. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The American Scholar, Poets & Writers, and other magazines. She is a frequent contributor of essays to Orion. One of these was honored as notable in Best American Essays; another received a Pushcart Prize. She has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush, and Fulbright Foundations, and held residencies at the Amy Clampitt House, the Poetry Center, and the MacDowell Colony. After decades of teaching and serving as the poetry editor of Water~Stone Review, she recently stepped back from her work as a tenured professor in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University and is currently a full-time writer and mom. 

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poetry. Just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 or so of the application deadline.

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

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

The course: Writing from the Beating Heart of the Archive

We live in the entanglement between the past, present, and future, to roughly paraphrase writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to write about those places, people, and events of yesterday in a vivid way that honors the truth.

In this generative workshop, participants will aim to compose thoroughly-researched writing that also manages to dance off the page, alive and pulsing. We’ll read authors who engage with the historical record, discuss and explore the techniques they use to breathe life into their subjects, and write under that influence. Whether you wish to work on creative nonfiction, historical fiction, build futuristic worlds informed by the past, or pen persona poems, we’ll think carefully together about how you might make the past just a little more present in your work.

Duration: This online workshop meets on Wednesdays from February 17 through March 31 and (skipping March 17th), exact time TBA.

Application window: January 1-15, 2027

The Instructor: Maria Pinto is a Boston area naturalist, essayist, and fictioneer. She leads regular fungal forays at Arnold Arboretum, and her writing has appeared in Science, Arnoldia, and Orion, where she’s a contributing editor. Her book of lyric essays inspired by fungi, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, is a Massachusetts Book Award honoree, and was the recipient of the Don Kissel Prize for Nonfiction.

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poetry. Just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 or so of the application deadline.

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

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

The course: Seeing by Saying 

“A place which has not been evocatively described,” says Robert Macfarlane, “becomes easier to destroy.” What if our writings were not literary artifacts but implements for saving places by getting closer—to a leaf tip, a dewdrop, a cricket’s carapace? What if we could write our way past the mirror of our modern nonchalance into the lens of being inside the world of the small, the blurred, the forgotten. This will be a generative poetry workshop intent on making contact, through the writing of fragments construed as seeds for growing text with texture—the senses at work in close relation to your local habitat. What is strange there, what have you overlooked, what is sacred in itself? How could you write spells to protect and heal?

 Duration: This online class meets over six consecutive Thursdays from 1-4 pm ET (10-1 PT) from January 21 to February 25.    

Application window: November 1-15    

The Instructor:  Kim Stafford has been writing and teaching writing since deep in the last century. He is the author of Writing for Happiness: Seeker, Artist, Witness (forthcoming), and As the Sky Begins to Change. He served as Oregon Poet Laureate 2018-2020, and has led writing workshops in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. He teaches and travels to raise the human spirit.

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poetry. Just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 or so of the application deadline.

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

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

The Course: In This Poem Something Grows

This workshop title is, of course, aspirational. More likely, something grows, and then it fails. Or something thrives for a given set of conditions. In this generative workshop we’ll hone our observation skills while also risking accountability for our role as an observer in the human and natural world. How might we better pay attention to the ways we impose ourselves upon our environment (and the ways the world imposes on us)? In what ways might our observations shape our writing? What poems might develop out of a sustained practice of paying attention? To ground our initial observations, participants will be asked to grow a plant from seed (or sustain a plant cutting) until it roots.

Readings will include poems by Tarfia Faizullah, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Donika Kelly, Reginald Dwane Betts and many more. Each week, we’ll discuss sample poems and respond through in-class writing exercises that will help draft a poem for the following week. The last hour of every class will be used to share recently drafted poems so that every student will have the opportunity to receive feedback.

Duration: This online class meets over six consecutive Tuesdays from 6-9pm ET (3-6 pm PT) from January 19 to February 23. Application window: November 1 – 15

The Instructor: Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet and teaching artist in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. Her chapbook One Way to Listen was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Competition. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Florida Book Awards, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House, Idyllwild Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems can be found on The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, and Poetry Daily. She has taught craft intensives with Tin House, Hugo House, Sundress Publications, and The Loft Literary Center, and currently serves as an associate editor with the Beloit Poetry Journal.

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poetry. Just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 or so of the application deadline.

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

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

The Course: How you write what you write  

Style, one could say, is how you write what you write. It’s the discrete way that any sort of writing unites the most common elements of the craft: word choice, sentence structure, the organization and order of whatever the writer is expressing. While an evocative style tempts us to imitation, the results are rarely anything more than a self-conscious study on the path to developing our own authentic style. All accomplished styles seem to hide their gifts in the open. They are bewitchingly sly— “insincere” Oscar Wilde would say—often multivalent, always with an eye toward what they’ve left out. Skillful stylists such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Mary Oliver, or Wendell Berry seem to produce without effort the singular way that a story, poem, or essay should unfold, while the voices that grace their pages—that of a character or narrator—seem to materialize in our imaginations as a complete person with spiritual heft, a thriving sensibility, arrested there in art and shimmering for as long as the words exist. At its finest, style is a sort of gestalt of soul.

  So, how do we understand and craft our own styles? We’ll explore that question. We’ll do so by working primarily with the personal essay while dipping periodically into poetry. We’ll examine the effects of word choice and sentence structure, as well as consider some of the organizational strategies that essayists use. Always, we’ll keep alive the question of style: What’s yours? How so? Why so? We’ll sample a range of writers, from Joan Didion and Elizabeth Bishop to Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, and Patricia Hampl, distinguished stylists all.  While we’ll discuss some of these readings, our class time will center on the work of our members. We’ll undertake a variety of eye-opening, generative exercises and, I hope, enjoy several lively discussions, each based on a project that centers on a particular aspect of style. We’ll share and support one another’s work in a structured and caring space; the primary purpose of this course is to provide you with a range of practical tools and useful insights that will deepen your skills as a writer and artist. This course is open to writers of all skill levels.

 Duration: This online workshop meets over eight consecutive Sundays from January 10 to  February 28th from 7-9 pm ET (4-6 pm PT).

 Application window: November 1 – 15

 The Instructor: Jennifer Landretti has been writing for about forty years. She began as a fiction writer and some years later, while in grad school (MFA, Cornell) switched over to nonfiction. In addition, she writes poetry and lyrics in the folk genre. Over the decades, most of her published essays (including the Pushcart-winning “A Fish in the Tree”) have appeared in Orion, under the name John Landretti. (Several years ago, Jennifer discovered that she is transgender and soon after changed her name.) Her interests are varied. Of the natural world, she is fond of geology, wildflowers, stars. She is an avid reader who has enjoyed backpacking, studied Medieval sword work, and plays an acoustic guitar. She spent her career as an adult education teacher, the last eight years of which occurred in a state prison. Recently retired, she is now able to devote herself fully to writing–primarily essays and poetry. Samples of her essays and poetry can be found at jenniferlandretti.com.

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poetry. Just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 or so of the application deadline.

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

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

The Course: Second Nature: Writing Foreign Environments

Sometimes we as writers are compelled to focus on natural environments other than those we consider our own, whether as subjects or backdrops of our stories. These might be places in countries we have moved to, or remote destinations we have visited; they could be locations we study from afar, or historic or fictional landscapes we (re)construct. How do we approach such landscapes in a purposeful way, describing and evoking them meaningfully for our readers? And what does it mean to belong—or not—to any given natural environment?

This workshop will explore different points of entry to foreign environments, including ecological, sociological, linguistic, aesthetic and more-than-human approaches. Alongside these methodological considerations, we will read and discuss selections of relevant environmental fiction and narrative nonfiction ranging from Felix Salten’s Bambi (1923) to Cal Flyn’s The Savage Landscape (2026), with texts in between by authors such as Rachel Carson, Robert Macfarlane, and Anna Tsing. Exercises during and between sessions will offer opportunities to write and share our own work, culminating with a complete draft of a story or essay. Fiction and nonfiction writers at any level are equally welcome—bring your curiosity, empathy, and sense of adventure.

Duration: This online course meets across eight consecutive Saturdays, 12–2 pm ET (9–11 am PT, 5–7 pm GMT), from January 9 to February 27.

Application window: November 1 – 15

The Instructor: Shauna Laurel Jones is a writer, translator, and twice-over foreigner: originally from the US, she immigrated to Iceland in 2007 and to the UK in 2018. She holds an MA in art history from UC Santa Barbara and an MSc in environmental studies from the University of Iceland. A regular contributor to Orion, Shauna has had several features published or forthcoming in addition to her Visual Fields column on art and nature; she has been shortlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented voices in nature writing and longlisted for the 2026 Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize. Shauna lives with her family in London.

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poetry. Just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 or so of the application deadline.

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