MALS MALS 369 WRITING NATURE: STORIES AND REFLECTION, INSIDE AND OUT

This course is aimed at those with a special interest in exploring their relationship with the natural world through short pieces or longer narratives. Why do we say we "go into" nature when we're leaving our urban, suburban, or interior spaces? How far do we have to go before we've "arrived"? Can we stay where we are, gaze out the window, remember, imagine, wonder? What happens when we look down at stones or up at stars? What is the difference between grand vistas and commonplace ones? Or those that are new and those that are familiar? In other words, what does our relationship rely on, how does it shift, and what does it tell us. And because this is a creative writing course, the question of how we make our experience accessible to others is crucial, so we'll address the story itself, style, voice, and the use of reflection as we consider what is probably an evolving or shifting relationship with previously unarticulated aspects of experience. The course is called "Writing Nature," not "Nature Writing," to remove the implicit hyphen that suggests a genre and emphasizes the inquiry that writing offers us. A broad selection of readings will include works of well known writers and others less well known but no less intuitively linked to the world we inhabit.

Instructor

Barbara Kreiger, Anna Minardi