Instructor: Staff online
Students will explore how creative writing engages, interrogates, reveals, and impacts environmental issues and concerns: What are the ways in which fiction writers, poets, nonfiction writers, and screenwriters can address pressing U.S. and global environmental issues? How does creative writing inform and help shape public and institutional debate? Can it, directly or indirectly, affect environmental policy? Whether through short stories, essays, poems, or other forms, we will explore how writing can expose current environmental topics and concerns and support new ways of thinking about the environment. This course combines critical, analytical discussions, creative writing workshops, and involvement with a local environmental organization or a related organization to give students an integrated, experiential learning opportunity. Students will conduct research to learn about new topics; use the writing process to explore and critique a topical environmental issue; and examine the landscapes that they know best through creative writing exercises.