The course: Investigating Place
This course will serve as a deep investigation of a single natural landscape of significance to you. This can be the woods near your home where you walk each day, a long-ago lake or coastal place where you haven’t dipped a toe in the water since you were a child, or somewhere you’ve never been but are fascinated by because of its profound or precarious ecological position. By the end of our six weeks together, you will have composed a suite of poems meditating on this place and digging into why its colors, textures, and scents deserve our close observation and consideration. This is your opportunity to peel back the layers—of personal observation, embodied memory, and the acquired knowledge of wildly varied (and sometimes imperiled) flora and fauna—that make our hearts wild for wild places.

The Instructor: Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems:  Beautiful in the Mouth, which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, The Keys to the Jail, and All Its Charms, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje’s poetry and prose have appeared in Narrative, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Orion, The Believer, and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Keetje is the Editor of Poetry Northwest.

Duration: This class meets once a week over six consecutive Thursdays from 1-4 ET.

Application period: August 15-30th (closed).

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