Welcome to the Orion Submissions portal. Below you will find all current active windows for submissions, events, and writers’ workshops. Thank you for your interest!
Visual Submissions: Rainbows!
We’re continuing our reader-sourced Murmuration section next spring, and we need your help. Each season we put out a call for photography in response to a specific theme, then pick fifteen of our favorites to run as a group of 2 x 3 images in a grid format at the front (second page) of the magazine.
This time we’re looking for images of rainbows. Any variety you can think of! Submit 1-3 images, and if we select one, you’ll get a complimentary year-long subscription to Orion. Don’t worry about resolution or specs yet, but know that horizontally oriented photographs work best.
*By submitting these images to Orion for inclusion in the Murmuration section of the magazine you also grant us permission for non-exclusive potential future use of said images with proper attribution, if selected.
The submission window will run from November 1-15, 2024.
Questions? Write to submissions@orionmagazine.org
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 the Greater-than-Human World
Our poetry workshop will focus on poems and various poetics that seek to move beyond a solely human perspective to adopt the concerns and perspectives of the other living beings we share the world with. We will write poems about other-than-human animals, trying to listen to their lives, learning what science can tell us, seeking out the old myths and stories people have told through time, and working at observation, listening, and learning about other ways to communicate, and then trying to translate this back into our art. The class will be generative, working on new poems written during the course session.
Duration: This class meets January 14 – February 18, over six consecutive Tuesday evenings from 6-9 pm ET.
Application window: November 1-15, 2024.
The Instructor: Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, most recently Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems; Coffin Honey; and Native Species, all published by Michigan State University Press. He has edited several nonfiction collections, including A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia from the University of Georgia Press. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Orion, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
Tuition
Each Zoom workshop is available for $500. 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 sometimes 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.
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 Elizabeth Strout, 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. Rather than map out a set curriculum, I’ll use a more organic approach: beyond the first couple of classes, I’ll adapt the course to the direction that class members seem most interested in going. Whatever direction we do go, we’ll undertake a variety of eye-opening, generative exercises and, I hope, enjoy several lively discussions, each centered on a particular aspect of style. This course is open to writers of all skill levels.
Duration: This online course meets from January 12th – March 2nd over eight consecutive Sundays from 6-8 pm ET (5-7 CT, 4-6 MT, 3-5 PT).
Application window: November 1-15, 2024.
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. To a lesser extent, 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 Jenn 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, and 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 working on a memoir.
Tuition
Each Zoom workshop is available for $500. 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 sometimes 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.
The course: The Landscape of the Personal
Our identities shift based on our surroundings; the landscape is an extension of our narrator’s story. This workshop aims to make intentional use of the relationship between setting and narrator in personal work. Whether your landscape is the story, or just a part of it, we’ll work to strengthen this reflexive relationship on the page. Through short readings, generative exercises, and observation, we’ll work together to stretch toward the universal by illuminating the particular. *While our readings will focus on nonfiction, this class would be beneficial to writers of all genres.
Duration: This online course meets from January 7th – February 11th over six consecutive Tuesdays from 6-9 pm ET.
Application window: November 1-15, 2024.
The Instructor: Kelly McMastersis the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir in EssaysandWelcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town, and co-editor of two anthologies–Wanting: Women Writing About DesireandThis is the Place: Women Writing About Home. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The American Scholar, Lit Hub, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, River Teeth, Rumpus, Tin House, and more. She runs The Magpie newsletter at Substack and is a TESS (The Environmental Storytelling Studio) collaborator. She is an associate professor of English and director of publishing studies at Hofstra University, and she lives on Long Island.
Tuition
Each Zoom workshop is available for $500. 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 sometimes 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.
The course: Cities, Senses, and the Poetry of Place
In poetry, the most resonant and memorable images evoke the senses and are heightened by musicality, voice, and lineation. The most effective images transport us in time and space. In this eight-week poetry workshop, we will close-read and discuss poems that locate a connection to nature from within cities and against a backdrop of global environmental trauma. Participants will generate new work with a strong sense of place—whether setting serves to locate an emotional memory, or the poem is an ode to a hometown. Together we will consider different approaches to writing place, and write our own poems that reside in our cities and senses. Students will be invited to share their work and receive feedback from their peers. We will read poems by Chen Chen, Naomi Shihab Nye, June Jordan, Hanif Abdurraqib, Hayan Charara, Marwa Helal, and others.
Duration: This class meets from January 5 through February 23rd over eight consecutive Sundays from 3-5 pm ET (12-2 PT).
Application window: November 1-15, 2024.
The Instructor: Jessica Abughattasis the author of Strip (University of Arkansas, 2020), winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara. She received an MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles. From 2020 to 2022, she was the Poet Laureate of Altadena, California and editor of Altadena Poetry Review. Her poems can be found in Poetry, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Tuition
Each Zoom workshop is available for $500. 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 sometimes 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.