maroon~age

Whether we find ourselves in predominantly urban settings or the most rural of environments, the natural world beckons to have its voices articulated by the writer.  Fortunately, we don’t have to plumb the Grand Canyon or scale Mount Everest in order to center nature in our current or next writing projects.  Join poet-artist and Georgia Master Naturalist Jennifer Price for this four-week workshop about the visceral, ancestral, and linguistic implications that Earth holds for us as writers and stewards of its ecologies.   

Detailed Schedule

Week 1 (April 27th): 

Cultivating the Writer’s Relationship with Ecology (World-building)

Master gardener training, state park passes and, of course, all the nature books your local public library card will hold are just a few of the free or low-cost opportunities for us to explore nature through the practice of writing, right in our own backyards.  In this first session, we will survey these and other accessible activities as strategies for conjuring our innate naturalist sensibilities, which we can in turn transfer to the worlds that we craft with our words. 

Week 2 (May 4th):  Decolonizing the Language Around Nature (Re-defining perspectives)

As is the case with any system of classification, investigation of the language that identifies flora and fauna will reveal patterns of erasure and objectification.  For our second session, we will challenge the English language and its oppression of the natural world and identify ways to incorporate Indigenous and ancestral lexicons into our writing research and craft.

Week 3 (May 18th):  Transcribing What Nature Has Witnessed (Narrative voice)

Where our own diasporic histories may be challenging to trace, the generational presence of birds and trees is a reminder that we as writers can reimagine our ancestral narratives through (for example) avian patterns of migration or through the science of dendrochronology.  Session three will take us outdoors to observe and record the messages carried forward from the past by the plants and animals in our immediate surroundings.

Week 4 (May 25th) :  Nature Journaling for Continuous Inspiration (Revision as ritual)

For this final session, we will intensify the observing and recording that we began in session three by developing individualized rituals for journaling in nature.  Considering that we each hold multiple intelligences, we will look at a range of journaling techniques, from the traditional pen-to-paper method to those more experimental and embodied before each practicing a technique of choice.  We will ultimately focus on journaling as a practice of ritualized archiving that we can periodically source for guidance in adjusting and revising our writing projects.  

ABOUT JENNIFER

Jennifer Price is an African American, Chicago born poet, visual artist, and former public librarian rooted in the Southern United States.  She has the honor of being a member of Obsidian Literature & Arts’ inaugural O|Sessions Black Listening cohort, and she is a 2023 Teaching Artist trainee of the Community-Word Project.  Jennifer’s work is published in the up//root collective, in Torch Literary Arts’ Friday Feature Series, and in the Kolaj Institute’s rendition of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, a Master of Library & Information Science from the University of South Carolina, and is a certified Georgia Master Naturalist.  Jennifer’s creative practice embraces theory and research along with issues of motherhood and place.