The Art and Science of Knowing Nature: A Nonfiction Workshop

How do we know nature? Science is a way of knowing, of generating new knowledge. In what ways might art also be a way of knowing, of generating new knowledge or reclaiming old ways of seeing that still may prove essential to us in our urban lives? This workshop will explore these questions by reading model essays, exploring the local environs and memory, studying craft elements in nonfiction, drafting and discussing new nonfiction pieces. Memoir, personal essay, lyric essay, or hybrid forms and writers at all levels are welcome.

Alison Hawthorne Deming is Regents Professor at the University of Arizona. She is the author of ten books of poetry and prose. Her work has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Walt Whitman Award from the American Academy of Poets, Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, among other honors. Her most recent books are Stairway to Heaven (Penguin Poets 2016) and the essay collection Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (Milkweed 2014.) Her work is widely published including in The Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing.