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

Starting in 2025, we will 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: Growing Earth Poems

How might we grow a poem draft in the way a vine climbs, leafs out, and spangles in full? In this workshop, we will draft earth poems, then see what they really want to say, to become, how they desire to fully flower. We’ll see what’s beyond the stage of good enough, leaning into a poem’s later season of ripe surprise. If a poem has roots (the unseen, unsaid), a stem (the stanza body), leaves (the scaffold of words), then how might we best let it flourish into flower and fruit (the gifts your poem delivers)? We will see what we might learn from the earth as we write poems for the earth—a river poem in the rhythm of water, a stone poem with the density of stone.

Duration: This online course meets over six consecutive Thursdays from 1- 4 pm ET (10-1 pm PT) from October 9 – November 13.

Application window: July 20 – August 5

Instructor: Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term.

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.

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

Starting in 2025, we will 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: Wild, Messy, Bold: Kickstart Your Writing Project

In this eight-week course, writers will gain significant ground in creating a wild, messy, bold, exploratory draft of a creative project, by committing themselves to the development of a regular writing schedule. Along the way, we will meet weekly to offer accountability and encouragement, learn more about how to harness the energy of 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 start 2026 not resolving to “write more,” but already writing. This class is for nonfiction writers, poets, or writers whose work falls somewhere between.

We will read and discuss the book 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round by Jami Attenberg. Please obtain a copy through a bookstore or the library before the first class meeting.

Note: In Spring 2026, Katrina will offer a follow-up companion course to this one, focusing on revision. Writers enrolled in this course will have first priority in signing up for it.

Duration: This class meets September 29 – November 17 over eight consecutive Monday evenings from 7-9 pm ET.

Application window: July 20 – August 5

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

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.

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

Starting in 2025, we will 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: Following and Falling Past the Line

In the preface to The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach writes, “line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem… it is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically…only by listening to the effect of a particular line in the context of a particular poem can we come to understand how line works,” For Longenbach, the line’s work is contingent upon its relationship to the poem’s other craft elements. Similarly, The Massachusetts College of Art and Design states the line is “defined by a point with variable width moving through space. Line may be descriptive, implied or abstract.”  In poetry and in visual arts, the line implies a relationship between movement and space.

In this six-week long class we’ll consider the role of the line and how it gives a sense of proportion and perspective to the world inside the poem. The class is generative. We’ll begin our sessions with close readings and conversations about lineation and form. Then we’ll spend time as a class responding to prompts generated from our close readings. There will also be time to workshop poems and to share new work.

Duration: This online course meets over six consecutive Wednesdays from 6-9 pm ET (3-6 PT) from September 3- October 8. 

Application window: July 20 - August 5, 2025

Instructor: Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories and a 2025 Whiting Award recipient. She held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation, and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Ecotone, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and her MFA from Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency MFA program. She lives with her family in Fairbanks, Alaska.

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.