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 More-Than-Human World from Proposal to Page

This nonfiction course will center on a wealth of contemporary work inspired by the more-than-human world, laying the groundwork for book-length projects. Through close readings of literary material as well as industry documents like book proposals, weekly exercises, and workshopping, we’ll consider the practical aspects of developing nonfiction projects, as well as techniques for writing the environment in our current moment. We’ll examine tools for writing about plants, animals, and other vibrant cues that shape our narratives, ask how readers can be invited into environmental conversations, and consider how writing about nature is necessarily tied to struggles for justice and a better world. We’ll finish the course by workshopping either an industry-standard book proposal or chapter sample. Whether you’re outlining, querying, or already writing, this course is ideal for those wanting to sharpen their creative and pitching skills and develop a community for the long-haul of writing a nonfiction book.

The Instructor: Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of three books of nature writing: Dispersals, Two Trees Make a Forest, which was shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021, andTurning. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. 

The Duration:  This class meets over six consecutive Saturdays from 1-4 pm (ET) from September 21 to October 26, 2024.

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.

How to Apply: These workshops may be competitive. Please tell us a bit about yourself in a cover letter and send up to 1500 words of your best prose. 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 two of the application deadline.  

Apply July 15-30, 2024

Questions? Contact workshops@orionmagazine.org or check out our FAQ page.

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.

Writing Rhizomatically
 Rhizomes are the runners that many plants and trees (like sassafras, elder, Solomon’s seal, ferns, and mayapples) send forth as they spread outward from a “mother” plant into a proliferation of shoots. In this class, we will use this growth pattern as a metaphor for our writing. How can we begin with one idea or image and let it grow naturally outward? How can we allow our thoughts to spread across the page in search of fertile ground adjacent to the “mother” thought, shooting up into more green growth? Let us send forth runners, explore, and see what takes root.

This course will be process-oriented and generative. Writers will have an ample amount of class time to generate material, share thoughts and ideas. We will read some published works with rhizomatic structures. Your instructor will invite plants, their rhizomes and roots, into the class for inspiration, and you will develop a draft of an essay throughout the course. Let us write in plant-like ways, in ways that machines can’t. Let us wander, probe the page as soil, and draw ourselves closer to our own rhizomatic intelligence.

Six classes will be held on Zoom, in two three-week blocks, with a break of one week in between. 

The Instructor: Holly Haworth is a certified Southern Appalachian naturalist, a poet, and an award-winning essayist. Her essays have been listed as notable in The Best American Travel Writing and included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. They appear in The New York Times Magazine, Orion, Oxford American, Lapham’s Quarterly, Sierra, Terrain.org, Literary Hub, and the On Being radio program blog. She is a recipient of the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism. Her first book of poems, The Way the Moon, is forthcoming. Her first nonfiction book This Resounding World: A Field Guide to Listening was the winner of a Robert B. Silvers Foundation grant for works in progress.

The Duration: Classes will run over six Thursdays from September 12 – October 24 from 4:30-7:30 ET/1:30-4:30 PT. * Note: We will not meet on October 3rd, but rather use that week as a break for your writing to grow outside of class.

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.

How to Apply: These workshops may be competitive. Please tell us a bit about yourself in a cover letter and send up to 1500 words of your best prose. 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 two of the application deadline.  

Apply July 15-30, 2024

Questions? Contact workshops@orionmagazine.org or check out our FAQ page.

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.

Creative Writing in the Anthropocene

Creative writing within the framework of the Anthropocene is relatively undertheorized, yet critical in a time when our current geological era is being shaped by humans. In this hybrid course, we will demystify approaches to poetry and creative non-fiction that address the sixth mass extinction, climate change, and the ecological crisis, as well as explore how to narrate and represent the Anthropocene. Since climate change is a byproduct of human interventions in the natural world, we will consider the nuanced entanglements of nature and culture, as well as how the environmental crisis is in many ways a crisis of language and literacy, exploring how writers can develop readers’ ecological literacy and help them to develop a more sustainable relationship to the creatures and world around them. Integral to our study will be an engagement with writing that reckons with the more-than-human-world, with the systems and creatures that help us to think beyond an anthropocentric frame. Of value to the creative writer seeking new ways to address the Anthropocene in their writing, we will read work by such authors as Lia Purpura, Rebecca Giggs, Rebecca Solnit, Daisy Hildyard, Elizabeth Bishop, Patricia Smith, Camille Dungy, Anne Haven McDonnell, and Charlotte Pence, among others. We will be reading and writing each week with the goal of generating new work in any genre in a supportive environment. This is a virtual course to be held on Zoom.

The Instructor: Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and The Death Spiral. In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited with Virginia Konchan. In 2024, Middle Creek Press published Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize.  Sarah’s writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.

The Duration: Classes will run on Wednesday evenings from 5-8 pm ET, September 4 – October 9.

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.

How to Apply: These workshops may be competitive. Please tell us a bit about yourself in a cover letter and send 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 or two of the application deadline.  

Apply July 15-30, 2024

Questions? Contact workshops@orionmagazine.org or check out our FAQ page.

We’re continuing our reader-sourced Murmuration section this winter, 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.

During our submission window from July 15-30, 2024, we’re looking for your best photos of marquees, theaters, drive-ins, and screens in the wild. 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.

Questions? Write to submissions@orionmagazine.org

Call for pitches for our upcoming issue all about mushrooms

For next summer, we're planning a celebration of all things mushrooms: foraging for them, encountering them on grocery store shelves, even swimming by them. We're looking for pitches for nonfiction stories about important mushrooms in history. Send us your ideas for emperors poisoned by mushrooms, brilliant mushroom heists, or religious leaders who prayed to mushrooms.  Pitches (not full stories, please!) should be for nonfiction (essay, memoir, or reporting), and no more than a page or so.

This window will open July 15-30, 2024.

Note: In general, we're not able to consider submissions for poetry, fiction, or AI-assisted works at this time, even during an open pitch window.

Questions? Write to submissions@orionmagazine.org.