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: The Web and Its Weaver: Connection Between the Self and Nature in Narrative
When writing the narratives of this complicated period of collapse, we often want to focus on the web—stories about the environment and nature, politics and movements. But a deep story is often best told through the medium of the self as both an observer of the web and its weaver. Whether we begin from the body, the family, the neighborhood, the ecosystem, or the marginalized group, every story is an invitation to recognize that we’ve outgrown our old, imagined separations between a single human life and the world. When we discover connections, we write stories that can heal ourselves and the world entire.

Together we will learn ways to manage the complexities of telling stories this way and embrace the vibrant possibilities of our narratives about nature. Classes will include selected readings and response, the chance to share works in progress, craft conversations, and targeted generative exercises.

Duration: This online course meets from February 2 – March 9 over six consecutive Mondays from 6-9 pm ET (3-6 pm PT).

Application window: November 1 - 15 

Instructor: Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician. Her work on loss, oceans, and extinction has appeared in Orion, Guernica, The LA Review of Books, Al Jazeera, and the anthology Elementals. She has received a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and a 3Arts Make a Wave grant. Her books include her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary and her novel All the Water in 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. 

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 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

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: Writing the Scar: A Generative Poetry Workshop on Climate Grief

In this six-week generative workshop, we’ll explore poetry as a space for grief, witness, and reimagining in times of climate crisis. Together we’ll read poets who grapple with loss, extinction, resilience, and renewal, such as Ada Limòn, Natalie Diaz, Camille T. Dungy, Craig Santos Perez, Jorie Graham, and others. Each session will balance close reading, discussion, and generative writing exercises. By the end of the workshop, learners will have a complete packet of 5-6 poems that hold and give language to personal and collective ecological grief.

Duration: This online course meets from January 11 – February 15 over six consecutive Sundays from 7- 10pm ET (4-7pm PT).

Application window: November 1 - 15. 2025

Instructor: Jessica Abughattas is the author of Strip, 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

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 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

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: 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.

Application window: November 1 - 15. 2025

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, 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

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 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

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: Of Fungi and Flames: Writing Climate Witness

When the planet’s shifting systems breathe out chaos, and each new day’s metrics are unprecedented, how do we find language to write the stories of now? Is it possible to translate scorched soil, the flooded subway, our red-listed more-than-human kin, even the whole cascading cacophony of it all onto the page, faithfully? Come to this workshop with questions like these and an openness to formal experimentation in the pursuit of their answers. Writers of all levels and experience welcome!

Duration: This online course meets from January 5 – February 23 over eight consecutive Mondays from 12 – 2 pm ET (9-11 am PT).

Application window: November 1 - 15. 2025

Instructor: Maria Pinto is an author and educator living in the Boston area. She teaches for the literary nonprofit GrubStreet, and her work has appeared or will appear in Orion magazine, Obsidian, Necessary Fiction, and Arnoldia, among other publications. She has led workshops and given lectures for mycological societies in New York, Texas, Wisconsin, and California, and she leads regular forays at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. She is the author of Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, from Great Circle Books.

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 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

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: Writing about Food

The climate, soil, and landscape of a place often impart unique character to food; if we are wine people, we call this terroir. If we aren’t, we’re still looking for a better word. Writing about food becomes more than just food writing when it, too, is deeply tied to the places, ecosystems, cultures, and individuals who nurture what we eat. When food is on the table, what ideas can writers have, what worlds can they reveal, what relationships can they probe? How does what we eat tell us who—and where—we are? We’ll read writers like John McPhee, Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, Ross Gay, Iliana Regan, and Bill Buford. Then we’ll research and write our own food-focused personal essays. Classes will be discussion-based and generative, with time to share work. Students will leave class with at least one complete essay draft and multiple starts for new pieces.

Duration: This online course meets over six consecutive Wednesdays from February 4 to March 18 (skipping February 18) from 6-9 pm ET (3-6 pm PT).

Application window: November 1 - 15 

Instructor: Kate Lebo's first collection of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit (FSG 2021), won the Washington State Book Award. She's also the author of the cookbook Pie School (Sasquatch Books 2014, 2023), the poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books 2018), and coeditor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter & Booze (Sasquatch Books 2017). She writes a food column for The Inlander and is a regular contributor to Homecooked magazine. Other recent essays and poems have appeared in Orion, New England Review, SWING, and Cake Zine. Kate lives with her family in Spokane, Washington, where she is an apprentice cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm. 

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 or FAQs.