Bringing Place to the Page: Writing about Landscape, Home, and Travel

Additional Information

The market for creative nonfiction continues to show interest in books that grapple with place and environment, and especially those that combine the personal with an external gaze. Books like H Is for Hawk, Braiding Sweetgrass, The Hidden Life of Trees, Lab Girl, and Underland have found massive readerships among both literary and general audiences by engaging with places near and far and revealing complex textures and connections everywhere.

Writing about place without descending into self-satisfied nostalgia or eco-punditry is a balancing act and art. This webinar offers insight into how to transform perceptions into pages and help readers experience approximations of landscape in your nonfiction.

In this webinar, you will:

• EXAMINE how all writers must write about place and environment, even when they don’t label themselves “environmental” or “place-based” writers. You’ll learn to be aware and even take advantage of that inevitable fact in your work.
• CONSIDER the differences among environments: urban vs. rural/wilderness, home vs. away, environments in flux and transition zones. By understanding such distinctions, you’ll learn how to write compelling and persuasive narratives that move beyond flat, cliché language and into the more evocative and concrete.
• LEARN how to engage landscapes. A writer is always a part of any environment. We’ll consider ways of writing one’s self in a place/environment. What are the risks of writing about a specific place? We’ll also learn how to avoid environmental preachiness and nostalgia.

There will be time for a Q&A at the end of the presentation.

This webinar is ideal for writers who are just starting out, writers who have written in other genres (fiction, memoir, etc.) or writers just getting their feet into environmental/place-based writing.

All registrants receive a recording.