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: Crossing the Threshold

As Ecclesiastes and Fleetwood Mac teach us: life moves in seasons. How have writers throughout time navigated the transformative passages of human and greater-than-human life? The answer is: differently. In this multi-genre course, we will read and discuss works that explore themes such as death, love, ecstatic states, ecotones, seasonal and circadian rhythms, and existential forks in the yellow wood. We will add to these works with our own efforts, writing from prompts and sharing our work as a class. (Note: though participants will be invited to reflect on peer work, this is emphatically not a traditional workshop.) Homework will include periods of observation and reflection outdoors, journaling, and editing work written in-class. 

Readings may include Dante Alighieri, Octavia Butler, Teresa Avila, Christopher Okigbo, Nelly Sachs, James Hollis, Joy Harjo, Hafez, Masahide, Baldwin, Simone Weil, Annie Dillard, R.D. Laing, Toni Morrison, and many more!

Duration: This class meets over six consecutive Sundays from 12-3 pm ET (9 -12 PT) from  April 6 to May 18 (skipping April 20th).

Application period: January 15-31

The Instructor: Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, Orion, Granta, The Believer, and n+1. She lives in Seattle and is an editor for The Volta and Letter Machine Editions. She is the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World.

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. We often have partial scholarships available if you want to inquire.

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: Poetry toward the more-than-human world
In the often charged, historically fraught, liminal and gorgeous space between our human body-minds and other-than-human creatures, how can we use language to cross? What kinds of poetic leaps invite intimacy with other creatures? How can we see other creatures both on their own terms and how they are empathetically mirrored inside us? In this time of crisis on all fronts, how can poetry help us slow down and remember our belonging in the wild world? More than any other kind of language, poetry can hold the mystery, contradictions, questions, imaginative leaps, music and medicine to invite intimacy with the land and other creatures.

Elements of the leap:

• Science – research, let it inform and spiral into mystery
• In praise of description and the medicine of its invitation
• Inhabiting other consciousnesses and bodies through acts of empathy and imagination
• Estrangement – we are imagining into another consciousness diction and syntax to help defamiliarize, destabilize our habitual human speech/ language patterns
• Positionality – claiming our unique human voice and consciousness in conversation, or in juxtaposition with the other. Speaking from our own unique positionality, place, time, voice. Creating intimacy and aliveness through our own quirky voice and vision.
• Direct address – pray not about but to
• Centering another being in a poem (examples from literary field guides and the in-progress Rocky Mountain Literary Field Guide)

Duration: This course meets over six consecutive Mondays from March 31 to May 5, from 6-9 pm ET (4-7 pm MST.)

Application window: January 15-31, 2025

Instructor: Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, NM where she teaches as a full professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts (2023) and MacDowell, she is the author is Breath on a Coal (Middle Creek Press), winner of the Halcyon Poetry Prize, runner-up for the ASLE book prize, and long-listed for The Laurel Prize, and the chapbook Living with Wolves from Split Rock Press. She is currently working as a co-author/ co-editor on a Rocky Mountain Literary Field Guide, due out in 2026. Her poetry has been published in Orion magazine, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod Journal, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of poetry for the online journal Terrain.org.

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. We often have partial scholarships available if you want to inquire.

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: Re-seeing the Natural World

“The meadow is my prayer rug. Cypress trees, my minarets. And the wind, my call to prayer,” said the Persian poet, Sohrab Sepehri. In this 8-week poetry workshop, we will read and discuss poems in which nature becomes a haven, companion, cathedral, and/or a doorway into and out of ourselves. One with nature and also its witness, preserver, and destroyer, we will engage our senses, working with form, meter, stream of consciousness, and inspiration from other poems to express our multi-layered experience of a leaf, a bleached reef, our own wrinkling skin or whatever in the natural world calls us. We’ll read from an array of international writers, with special attention to Persian poets such as Sepehri, Farrokhzad, and Rumi. During sessions, we will discuss selected poems and have time to respond to prompts and share work.

Duration: This course meets over eight consecutive Mondays from March 17 to May 5, from 4 – 6 pm ET.

Application window: January 15-31, 2025

The Instructor: Haleh Liza Gafori is a New York City-born translator, performance artist, writer, and educator of Persian descent. A 2024 MacDowell fellow, she has translated the poetry of the Persian mystic and sage Rumi. Her book of translations entitled Gold: Poems by Rumi, was published by New York Review Books in 2022. Gafori’s second volume of translations, Water: Poems by Rumi, will be released in April 2025, also by NYRB Classics. Supported by an NYSCA grant, Gafori has created a musical and cross-media performance based on the book and has presented her work, via performances and lectures and workshops, at institutions such as Lincoln Center, Stanford University, the Academy of American Poets, and Sarah Lawrence College. Her book of translations Gold has been incorporated in the curricula of universities across the country.

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. We often have partial scholarships available if you want to inquire.

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.