2026 Fall Orion Online Environmental Writers' Workshop with Caitlin Shetterly

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 1-20

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.