2026 Fall Online Environmental Writers' Workshop with Kate Lebo
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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.