Description

How can narratives about history or the natural world complement the telling of our own personal life stories? In this workshop we will explore the form of the “braided essay,” learning to weave different threads of research, memory, and hands-on outdoor observation into cohesive and lyrical narratives. We will overview this experimental genre and read a spectrum of published work while experimenting with collaborative and generative writing exercises that can help kindle this kind of associative-based thinking and jumpstart creative process at your own desk. Participants will leave with new craft techniques and the starts of essays.

About the Instructor

Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear which won the 2024 Oregon Book Award.

Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron, 2023) which won the 2024 Oregon Book Award and was shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her essays, which are often about the intersection of emotion and the natural environment, appear in The New York Times, Outside, The Guardian, and The Yale Review, among other publications. She loves teaching writing, which she has done at the Attic Institute, Literary Arts, the Orion Environmental Writers Workshop, the New York Times Student Journeys, and at universities around the country. She is a contributing editor at Orion Magazine and lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Learn More
www.ericaberry.com

Materials List

You will need to bring:

A favorite way to write, that would be accessible both inside and outside (notebook and pen, laptop, etc)