Announcing the Twenty-fifth Annual

Wildbranch Writing Workshop

Nature Writing and Beyond
June 24-30, 2012
Co-sponsored by Sterling College and Orion magazine

APPLICATION DEADLINE APRIL 12, 2012.

THIS YEAR’S WORKSHOP FACULTY

	CHRISTOPHER COKINOS is the author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars and Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. He has worked in archives, lived in a tent in Antarctica, and trespassed onto the grounds of a French chateau in pursuit of book research. His work has appeared in Orion, The American Scholar, the New York Times, Science, Hawk and Handsaw, and Hotel Amerika, among many other venues. Cokinos is the winner of several awards, including a Whiting and the Mid-American Review FineLine Prize for Lyric Prose. He founded and edited Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing until budget cuts forced its closure. He lives in Tucson, where he teaches in the University of Arizona’s MFA program and is affiliated faculty with the Institute of the Environment. .
	DAVID GESSNER is the author of eight books, including Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature, My Green Manifesto, and The Tarball Chronicles, which Publishers Weekly called “a brilliant and thoughtful book.” He has published essays in many magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, and has won the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He taught environmental writing as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and is currently a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he founded the award-winning literary journal of place, Ecotone. He now puts a lot of energy into Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, a silly website he created with the writer Bill Roorbach. He still dreams of winning the national championship in ultimate Frisbee, but knows it will never happen.
	GINGER STRAND writes about nature, culture, and their frequently vexed interactions. She is the author of three books Flight, a novel, Inventing Niagara, the untold history of America’s most famous waterfall, and this spring’s Killer on the Road, which traces the history of the U.S. interstate highway system and the murderers, real and imagined, who have haunted it. She is the essayist for two forthcoming photography collections, and her magazine pieces have appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, This Land, Nature Conservancy, OnEarth, the Iowa Review, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. She grew up on a farm in Michigan and now lives in New York City.
	H. EMERSON BLAKE was trained as an ecologist, and his first editorial job was with a biology journal. After a decade as an editor at Orion, he assumed the role of editor-in-chief at Milkweed Editions, a book publisher. In 2005 he returned to Orion to serve as the magazine’s editor-in-chief. He is the editor of hundreds of magazine articles, as well as many books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s fiction.
	JENNIFER SAHN is editor of Orion. Articles she has edited have won multiple John Burroughs Essay Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and have been reprinted in Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best Creative Nonfiction, Best Spiritual Writing, and Best Nonrequired Reading. She has been on the editorial staff of Orion for the past twenty years.

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ABOUT WILDBRANCH

Offered at a college committed to natural resources education, Wildbranch is a week-long workshop of classes, lectures, readings, and discussions on the craft and techniques of fine writing about the natural world. The Wildbranch Workshop is for writers who want to improve and market their outdoor, natural history, and environmental writing, as well as environmental educators and activists who want to bring better writing skills to bear on their work.

The morning workshop and optional afternoon and evening sessions can benefit both professional writers as well as those with a personal interest in producing essays, journalism, or fiction that relates to the themes of nature and environment. Participants will select one of the faculty members with whom they will work each morning on writing, reading, and shared critiques. Class size is limited to twelve. The rest of the day offers a range of readings and discussions, with ample time to write and socialize. The teaching faculty is composed of professional writers and editors distinguished in their fields, noted for their teaching abilities, and dedicated to helping participants improve their skills.

Two editors-in-residence from Orion magazine offer participants the option of a one-on-one critique of a piece of their writing. A limited number of manuscripts will be accepted for review on a first-come first-served basis and a 4,000-word limit applies. Those wishing to take advantage of this opportunity are asked to submit their work to the workshop director by June 1.

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2012 FEES

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INFORMATION FOR APPLICANTS

Enrollment in the workshop is limited to 32. Applications must arrive at Sterling College by April 12, 2012. Applicants will be notified by May 8, 2012. A nonrefundable deposit of $50 is expected within two weeks of acceptance. Full payment must be made by June 1.

Applicants must indicate their first, second, and third faculty choices when submitting their application materials. A good-faith effort is made to match participants with either their first or second choice. Assignments will be made upon acceptance.

Participants may stay in Sterling College dormitories (which, like most dormitories, are shy on amenities) or make arrangements for other accommodations in the area. A limited number of $200 scholarships are available to help defray tuition expenses. Those interested in a scholarship should include a letter of need when submitting an application.

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HOW TO APPLY

Download the Wildbranch Writing Workshop application, fill it out, and ensure that it arrives at Sterling College by April 12, 2012. Selected applicants will be notified by May 8, 2012.

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2012 WORKSHOP SCHEDULE (tentative)

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COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

ADVENTURES IN FACT-FINDING
Christopher Cokinos
A fundamental premise of this workshop (and, indeed, of environmental writing in general): Your life is not entirely your own. Therefore, your writing should embody a creative and intellectual awareness of the forces at work that help to story you. Those forces are various and fascinating; they are cosmological, geological, biological, cultural—and more. During our week together, we will explore approaches to narrative that illuminate the personal and the external, bringing them together to create powerful narratives that are suffused with compelling factual research. You’ll get a taste for the various kinds of research that you might perform for any given piece and learn ways to make facts “sing.” Some might consider research to be dull, but we’ll be approaching fact-finding as a kind of adventure that will enliven your stories. Ideally, you’ll emerge from this workshop with one or more essay or story ideas, the beginnings of a draft, some preliminary research underway, a good handle on how to complete the rest of the fact-finding needed, and a variety of tools to “lyric up” factual information.

WRITING FROM PLACE
David Gessner
This is a workshop in creative nonfiction with a special emphasis on writing about place. We will explore the role that writing about places—sometimes natural places, sometimes not—can play in writing personal essays and memoir. For nonfiction writers who are stuck for a subject, place often unlocks other topics and deeper concerns. For some writers turning their minds to a specific place they care for—a home, a patch of woods, a beach—can prove a reliable muse. At the same time, writing about deeply knowing a place can make us feel a little mystical, even silly. As the great Alaskan writer John Haines said: “To express a place in art we need to take certain risks . . . we need intimacy of a sort that demands a certain daring and risk: a surrender, an abandonment.” Or as Barry Lopez puts it, we need to “become vulnerable to a place.” We’ll attempt this in our work and our reading.

FINDING THE STORY IN A WORLD OF DETAIL
Ginger Strand
The world is chaotic, boundless, and overflowing with detail; good prose is elegant, structured, and selects its details with precision. The best environmental writing—whether short form, newspaper story, essay, or memoir—reconnects a reader, emotionally and intellectually, with the world outside. Ironically, it can only do so by shaping that world into art. How do you find the narrative in the non-narrated jumble that is reality? How do you convert a collection of facts and quotes into a story that captures a reader’s emotions? We will approach this first and most critical job of the writer in a variety of ways: philosophically, by discussing what constitutes compelling narrative writing; critically, by looking at examples of excellent prose and how they are shaped; and practically, through exercises in which we convert notes and journal entries into structured prose. We will talk about differing ways to find the story and different approaches to telling it. And we will work on our skills at answering the questions, What is the story here? Why am I telling it? And why should a reader care?

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LECTURES, READINGS, AND DISCUSSIONS

MAGAZINE AND BOOK EDITING
- H. Emerson Blake and Jennifer Sahn
What do editors want? How do they make selections for their respective publications and publishing houses? What do they expect from writers? What can the writer do to increase the chances of being published? From initial contact to final changes, this lecture will address how writers and editors work together, the different responsibilities they face, and the ways in which the most fruitful relationship between them can be developed. Topics will also include the many different kinds of writing that are needed to describe our relationship with nature--literary, scientific, journalistic, educational, experiential, descriptive--and how writers can learn to match their style and interests with appropriate publications and publishers.

INTERNET PUBLISHING ROUNDTABLE
This roundtable session will explore the vast terrain of online publishing. Workshop participants and faculty are welcome to join in a discussion of various online media outlets, who publishes what, and how to begin writing for the Internet—whether it be a blog, assignment, or writing for an online magazine on spec.

WRITING AS A BUSINESS PANEL DISCUSSION
- Christopher Cokinos, David Gessner, and Ginger Strand
How does one earn a living as a writer? In this panel discussion, our workshop faculty will try to answer that question. Topics covered may include generating ideas, query letters, contracts, fees, manuscript preparation, revisions, time management, record keeping, taxes, health insurance, pensions, travel, home offices, agents, working with editors and publishers, and the differences among book, magazine, and newspaper publishing.

AN EVENING OF READINGS
- Christopher Cokinos, David Gessner, and Ginger Strand
Each of the three workshop faculty will read from their work at this event, which will be open to the public.

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OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES

There is fine fishing on nearby lakes and streams, including the Wild Branch, from which the workshop derives its name. Canoeing, hiking, bicycling, birding, and swimming in the beautiful Vermont countryside are other popular activities. Each morning, an informal bird walk is organized for Wildbranch participants.

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GETTING HERE

By car it is a 1.5 hour drive from Burlington, 3 hours from Montreal, and 4.5 hours from Boston. North-South interstate highways I-89 and I-91 both lie within 50 miles of campus. Commercial airline service is available to Burlington (VT), Manchester (NH), and Montreal. Pick-up service from the Burlington airport will be available for a modest fee.

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CORRESPONDENCE

For answers to questions about fees, travel, admissions, or curriculum, contact David Brown, Director, Wildbranch Writing Workshop, Sterling College, Craftsbury Common, VT 05827, 800-648-3591, extension 102.