Workshops
Guided by author Richard Goodman, learn how to evoke nature's beauty and significance through your words, no matter where you are.
Dates:
May 20, 2024 - Jun 1, 2024
Levels:
Beginner,
Intermediate,
Workshop Fee: $650
Workshop Duration: 15 hours over 5 sessions (Mondays & Wednesdays & and one Saturday, 12-3pm ET)
Workshop Location: Online
Class Size: 10
Note: This workshop will be held in a live, online format utilizing the Zoom platform.
Class meets Mondays & Wednesdays May 20, 22, 27, 29 & Saturday, Jun 1 from 12-3pm ET.
Whether it’s an endless desert vista, a bird’s morning song, a whale emerging from the sea, the bark of a weathered tree, or anything in between, the natural world calls to many of us. For many, it completes us. It stirs the deepest part of us with wonder and awe. Now, perhaps, more than ever.
Listen to that call. Write about what that means to you.
The goal of this workshop is to guide and help you summon those intimate and powerful reactions to nature and turn them into words that move others as well. Using sensory-based exercises, the aim is for you to depict the natural world with prose that evokes what you see and how you see it, and to make your unique reaction universal.
Each session, we will workshop student writing, with feedback from your fellow writers, and delve into craft, readings, and exercises. Some of this time will be allotted to individual writing and revision.
It’s all in the details, and so attention will be directed to word choice, metaphors, and creating lyrical sentences. This is a workshop about passion and precision. Each individual voice will be nurtured. We won’t neglect story, as many of our reactions to nature are tied to stories in our lives.
We use great nature writers as our guides in this search—Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, as well as those from the past who led the way—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson. Whether you’ve been near or far, traveled the globe or just savored the immediate world, you have something to say. Wherever you are, whether it be in a city, town or country, there is nature in some form. You just need to evoke it with your words, and that’s what you will do. This workshop is for writers at the beginner / intermediate levels.
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Instructor: Richard Goodman
Richard Goodman is the author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France, A New York Memoir, The Soul of Creative Writing and The Bicycle Diaries: One New Yorker’s Journey Through 9/11. Of French Dirt, the San Francisco Chronicle said, “It is one of the most charming, perceptive and subtle books ever written about the French by an American.” He co-edited The Gulf South: An Anthology of Environmental Writing. Richard Goodman has written on a variety of subjects for many national publications, including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Vanity Fair, Saveur and Ascent. He wrote the introduction for Travelers’ Tales Provence.