Writing Nature/Writing Through Climate Change

Writing Nature/ Writing Through Climate Change – Fall 2022 Simon  

“Nature is healing” became a popular meme in Spring 2020, when the pandemic brought industrial civilization to a grinding halt. We can think about that a few ways – one is that nature, freed from the burden of ships and trucks and planes and factories was, itself, healing. Another is that as many of us, shorn of our routines, spent more time outside, re-engaging with the natural world in ways it sometimes felt like we had forgotten to do, it seemed that nature was healing ... us. 

In this course, we will engage the natural world – and the changes it is undergoing at our own hands – by working in various modes of creative writing (poetry, fiction, personal essay, dramatic scene).  

How might sharing our understanding of (and processing the anxiety and grief we may feel about) global warming and the changes we humans are causing to Earth’s systems be a means to heal nature? And how might engaging in and thinking about and processing our experiences in the natural world, with ocean and forest and desert and mountain, with animal and plant and rock – even as they change – heal us?  

Let us meet the natural world in all its glorious forms ... with creative writing practice in all its glorious forms ...  

S/U grading. Course texts TBD and/or provided by instructor.