The Course: Abundant Practice

The world we live in provides a daily invitation for insight—for reflection, revisioning, and reorientation of our writing lives with our ecological lives. In this class, we will turn our attention and deep listening to the ephemeral present/presence of time and place, noticing, and writing from, the abundance and complexity of our natural world. This exercise-rich workshop aims to be a generative space for creating new work over the course of eight weeks. We will read a diverse selection of poems as inciting models while also seeking models for form, pattern, image, and sound in the natural world in and around us. This class will involve a balance of reading, writing, discussion, and responding to one another’s works-in-process. Close observation, methods for listening, scientific and creative inquiry, and careful writing will be fundamental to this practice. We will rediscover how writing with and from the natural world can enchant, inform, and re-illumine our lives and the lives of others. Above all, we will write for a restoration of balance.

The Instructor: Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of Leaving Tulsa and Bright Raft in the Afterweather. Her third book of poetry, The Maybe-Bird, is forthcoming from The Song Cave in 2022. Jennifer served as the Associate Editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She earned her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver, is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Her poetry has recently appeared in POETRY London, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. Jennifer currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the Literary Assistant to the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. She lives in San Francisco. Photo by Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda.

Duration: This class meets once a week over eight consecutive Tuesdays from 7-9 pm ET.

How to Apply: The application period is closed.