Creative Ecologies: Reading and Writing About the Environment

We come into the world and there it is.

––Juliana Spahr

How can literature and writing help us to know the ecological world––and ourselves––more deeply? Using a diverse array of fiction, academic articles, poetry, and mutli-modal narratives, students will develop creative writing skills, and habits of reading-as-writers, to explore connections between their identities and ecology. While many traditional English courses will focus on Transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau, this class provides opportunities for students to engage with the long traditions of less canonized authors––especially with Black nature writing, indigenous literature, and Pacific Northwest authors. At the end of this course, students will critically consider how and why authors turn to the natural world for inspiration, develop research skills across academic disciplines, be able to write in a variety of creative genres, understand the social and political impact nature writing has had in global environmental legislation, engage with diverse perspectives on nature, and feel more connected to the Pacific Northwest’s literary and ecological communities. 

This course is equally suitable for students whose interests lie in climate science as for those more drawn to the literary content, as the course’s final project will be a creative research project wherein students investigate a topic pertaining to the environment and blend their research with memoir writing. The course’s daily programming will be primarily creative writing exercises and group reading analysis structured around narratives by authors such as Lucile Clifton, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Ross Gay.