The course: The World Through New Eyes

When we step out into our surroundings, our senses build a world for us full of sights and sounds and textures that we understand through the lens of our human experience. But what if we could understand the world through non-human senses? What would it mean to see the environment through the eyes of a hawk, or hear it through the ears of a bat or a whale? What if we sensed the world the way a tree does?

In this hybrid fiction and creative nonfiction workshop, we will explore different ways to decenter the human point of view and reframe the environment around us from a non-human perspective. We will read selections by Karen Tei Yamashita, Barbara Gowdy, Amitav Ghosh, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ed Yong, and others. And we will draft our own work oriented toward describing the world in ways that incorporate non-human points of view. Along the way, we will explore techniques that add texture and depth to our writing and that invite readers to experience the world through non-human senses. Brief workshop sessions will allow us to engage with the work we generate with an eye toward structure, voice, and expanded imaginations. Our goal throughout this course is to broaden and deepen our understanding and appreciation of the vast diversity in our environment by inviting non-human perspectives to take center stage. 

The Instructor: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore, was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her short fiction has been published in the Minnesota Review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, and Five Dials. A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and a very skittish cat named Fig.

Duration: This class meets over six consecutive Sundays from 12-3 ET. 

Application period:  Applications closed. 

Click here for more details about Orion Online Writers’ Workshops.