2026 Early Fall Orion Writing Workshop: Traveling at Home with Erika Howsare

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: Traveling at Home: Wanderings Through the Infraordinary

Many of us have enjoyed long journeys (expeditions, treks) that involve radical changes of setting and habit. Much excellent writing has come out of this type of movement (think Robert Macfarlane, Peter Matthiessen, etc.)—and our culture often rewards the long-distance traveler with an aura of glamour and knowingness. The other side of traveling, of course, is staying home—and in our age there may be good reasons to cultivate a taste for the modest local journey that defamiliarizes the everyday.

In this course we will ask how writing can be a tool for creating intimacy with our own places, the places where we live, even (and especially) if they lack destination status. We’ll use a variety of techniques and practices to hone our connection to our location on earth—notably a committed sit spot practice. Science, art, dreams, and other modalities will also inspire our work with these infraordinary aspects of our habitats. We’ll be less focused on polishing finished pieces of writing and more concerned with using the notebook as a focusing device for our eyes, ears, intuition, and all other human sensory gifts, generating material that may later be refined into poems or essays. Weekly assignments will feel more like experiments; brief readings may include John Cage, Annie Dillard, Sarah Vap, Jen Denrow, Joanna Brichetto, Ellen Meloy, and others.

Duration: This online course meets across eight Tuesdays from 2-4 pm ET (11-1 PT) from September 1st through October 27th (breaking for October 20th).

The Instructor: Erika Howsare is the author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors (Catapult, 2024), a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. She has also published two books of poetry and co-created a podcast miniseries, If You See a Deer, which won a Best Documentary Award from the Virginia Association of Broadcasters. Her reviews, interviews and essays have been published in outlets like Orion, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, and her poetry has appeared in Verse, Fence, Conjunctions, and other journals. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, she worked in local journalism for more than two decades. She lives and homesteads in rural Virginia with her family, works as a writing teacher and mentor, and leads writing retreats.

Application deadline: Apply by July 15th.

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.