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 a few times a year. 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 Unseen with Laura Marris

Places are almost always more than they appear. Beneath the surface of familiar, local landscapes lie vast environmental histories, some shaped by people, and others by living communities that are invisible to the human eye. In this generative, multi-genre workshop, we will approach the literature of the unseen through buried environmental changes, like stories of toxicity, underground rivers, or animal routes beneath highways; as well as through the stories of other species whose presences are often camouflaged, secret, or otherwise hidden from view. How can writers attend to what has been erased, ignored, or buried? How can we unfurl a landscape’s memory, or evoke the invisible traces of place we all carry in our bodies? Together we’ll explore examples from writers and artists working with the flight paths of birds, the former meanders of the Mississippi River, as well as personal ways memory, psychogeography, and emotional resonance can mark a place.

In each session, we’ll combine readings with writing prompts and exercises designed to bring the unseen onto the page. Participants are welcome to create new drafts or work toward deepening an existing project. This course will be primarily generative, but everyone will have the option to share excerpts of their writing with the group, and to receive one-on-one feedback from Laura. No previous workshop experience is required, and all genres and levels are welcome!

Duration: This online course meets over six consecutive Tuesdays from 2-5 pm ET (11am – 2 pm PT) from July 8 – August 12.

Application window: May 20 – June 5

The Instructor: Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, The TLS, The New York Times, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, a Katharine Bakeless Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Books she has translated have been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Lukas Prizes, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University at Buffalo and a Teaching Artist at the Just Buffalo Literary Center. Her book of essays, The Age of Loneliness, was published by Graywolf in 2024.

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 or two 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 a few times a year. 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: Traveling Light: Writing the Uncertain with Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” –Marilynne Robinson

“All writers—all beings—are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force . . . All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.” –Janet Frame

To be skilled writers, we must be skilled noticers. Taking that concept as genesis, our workshop will begin with what the eye can hold: landscape, season, weather, gesture—the observable light. Then, we’ll look harder, study what isn’t so easy to perceive: inheritance and loss, grief and resilience. Janet Frame says we are exiles, but she also gestures toward home. The trick is in the paradox. Using memory, language, and research, we will write to hold that tension, to write between the lines of the known and unknown world. To decenter ourselves, if need be.

This nonfiction workshop is part of that lifelong journey—one we’ll travel together for a time, though I suspect it won’t end with the last class, setting down what the world contains, so we might better understand—or even transcend—it. Students will meet over eight consecutive Sundays and draw inspiration from writers of all genres—like Ocean Vuong, Emma Bolden, Erica Berry, Felicia Zamora, J. Drew Lanham, Barry Lopez, and others. Each week, we’ll read and generate and listen. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop one essay, which the group will comment upon and discuss, along with a thirty-minute one-on-one consultation with the instructor. Together, we might get a little closer to the lost land, maybe we realize we’re already there.

Duration: This online course meets over eight consecutive Sundays from 3-5 pm ET (12 – 2 pm PT) from July 6 – August 24.

Application window: May 20 – June 5

The Instructor: Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams received the 2013 Whiting Writers Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress The Following Sea. She has been further supported by a Rona Jaffe National Literary Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Orion, the Oxford American, StoryQuarterly, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Abrams currently teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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 or two of the application deadline.

Questions? Contact workshops@orionmagazine.org or check out our Help Center.