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

We also 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 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 community for the long-haul of writing a nonfiction book.

The Duration: This class meets over six consecutive Saturdays from 1-4 pm ET (10-1 PT) from November 7th through December 12th.

Application window: September 1-15

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, and Turning. 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.

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose. If you are a beginner and don't have something to share yet, that's okay, just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 so 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

We also 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 Nature in Fiction and Beyond

How can a novel influence how we see and care for the natural world? How does a fiction writer change the mind of a reader when they tell the story of a spider, a tree, grasses on the plain, a robin, or a rabbit? These are the questions great writers, such as Willa Cather, EB White, Richard Powers, Richard Adams and Frances Hodgson Burnett must have asked themselves as they have penned some of the world’s most abiding works of fiction. In this workshop, novelist Caitlin Shetterly will lead writers through a series of exercises and tasks aimed at understanding the layers great novelists from Charles Dickens to Allegra Goodman have written into their fiction in order to create depth and urgency about the natural world and their characters.

Much of the class will be focused on writing exercises that help teach how to do good research, how to fact check anything that is real and tangible, and the course will help us learn why the natural world will always add a level of importance to any story you tell. We will discuss how solid, real world, scientific foundations are as important in fiction as in nonfiction.

This course is open to nonfiction and fiction writers alike, at any level. Bring enthusiasm, an open mind, and a desire to tell complex and deep stories. Together, we will work on layering the natural world into story and help each other see where we can add the bounty and beauty of the natural world. We will also discuss how the urgent environmental messages of our time belong in the stories we tell for posterity.

Duration: This online course meets across six consecutive Wednesdays from 3:30-6:30pm ET (12:30-3:30pm PT), beginning on October 14th and concluding on November 18th.

Application window: September 1-15

The Instructor: Caitlin Shetterly is the author of five books, including two sequential novels, The Gulf of Lions (Harper, 2026) and Pete and Alice in Maine (Harper, 2023). She is also the author of Modified, an environmental book featuring a scientific investigation into pesticides and the companies that have taken over food production in America; it is one woman’s search for clean food and water, and it won the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2017. Shetterly’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Orion, Elle, Self, The Boston Globe, LitHub, Romper, and on Oprah.com, as well as on This American Life, Hidden Brain, Studio 360, NPR’s Weekend Edition, and various other public radio shows. She often writes about the natural world and how necessary it is for us to coexist and preserve. A Maine native, she lives with her two sons and husband in her home state.

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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose. If you are a beginner and don't have something to share yet, that's okay, just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 so 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

We also 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: But How Do We Know?

We don’t, or we kind of do. We know that if our essays are easily summed up, we’re missing something. We know that if we end with the idea we started with, we’ve failed. As creative nonfiction writers, how can we build our authority while embracing the essential mystery of our work? How do we become conscious of our limits and biases, find the holes in our expertise and memories, and use them to create greater risk and meaning? 

In this class, we’ll examine the different strategies writers use to create authority while not-knowing. We’ll explore how trusting and questioning ourselves can deepen intellectual honesty, personal vulnerability, and artistic surprise. We’ll consider how writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Helen Garner, and Anthony Bourdain engage with certainty and doubt. And we’ll practice moving forward in our work even (especially!) when we don’t know where we’re headed. Classes will be discussion-based and generative, with time to share work. By the end of our six weeks together, you’ll have one complete draft of an essay and multiple starts for new pieces.

Duration: This online course meets across six consecutive Tuesdays from 6-9 pm ET (3-6pm PT), beginning on October 13 and concluding November 17.

Application window: September 1-15

The 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

Please send a brief cover letter and up to 1000 words of your best prose or up to five pages of poetry. Just tell us about yourself in the cover letter. 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 so of the application deadline.

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

Send us your pitches for open-themed online stories! 

In addition to our quarterly themed calls for specific print issues, we now open twice a year for digital pitche submissions. These pitches are not tied to a particular theme; rather, they are an open call for story ideas that feel consistent with Orion’s digital identity and will appear exclusively online.

We are looking for pitches in the following categories: 

Short essays on general topics, food-related pieces, enumerations, conversations, graphic stories, and art portfolios. Before pitching, please spend some time familiarizing yourself with the stories on our website to get a strong sense of our categories and the work that fits in them.

In general, we prefer to read pitches (of up to 400 words), but if it is a short piece (<1000 words) we are also open to reading full drafts. Please note that we prefer to consider one story idea at a time. Length is flexible, but please bear in mind that we are unlikely to publish anything over 2,000 words.

We aim to respond to all submissions within three months of receipt.

Note: Please, no poetry, fiction, book reviews, op-eds, press releases, or AI-assisted works.