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:
How to Make Luck: Writing in Praise of the Ordinary

With so many things to worry over, we need to keep finding joy and celebrating gratitude. Where better to do so than in explorations of the natural world?

This feel–good workshop will help you write in praise of small beauties and large values you can find in rural, urban, suburban, or wild landscapes. Learn how to move beyond the obvious like and love into the deeper and more magnificent why. Each week, we will map at least one wonderfully ordinary element of our environments, lifting the subject up and enriching it with the finest elements of craft and wild attention. Class time will include discussion of published works on human and environmental ecologies and where and how they intersect, writing exercises, and time to write and share. Come prepared to work with new ideas and directions in this supportive setting. This course is open to poets and nonfiction writers at all levels.

Duration: This class meets October 27 – December 15 over eight consecutive two-hour classes, 6-8pm ET (3-5 pm PT). 

Application window: September 1 – 15

The Instructor: Lauren Camp serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). A former Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park, Camp is a recipient of the Dorset Prize, finalist commendations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

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:
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) from October 25 – November 29.

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. 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.