Climate Catastrophe & the Writer's Task with Nickole Brown

If we take the climate crisis at hand seriously—and in this lonely age potentially bereft of our fellow creatures—how can we help but feel an incapacitating sense of hopelessness that threatens to render things like poems useless? In this intensive, we’ll strive together to find ways past this debilitating hurdle. We’ll ask questions that instead of silencing ourselves will urge us on: How might writing allow us to move through the trauma wrought by these storms and fires and floods? And how might we bear witness to the devastation of our communities, much less depict the suffering of non-human beings? How might one avoid the pitfalls of producing work that is flat-lined with facts, or, worse, rendered incapable of communicating from our grief and rage? Ultimately, what is our responsibility as creatives to this epoch? What impact can we make with our words? We’ll study poems that have their own solutions to these challenges and will try our hands at writing through this darkness with awareness, control, and yes, even hope.