Comments (2)

By Simmons Buntin, November 21, 2009 4:49 am

I was asked recently to put together a brief comparison of sorts of writer’s conferences versus writing workshops around the idea of exposure to editors and publishers.  This is what I came up with:

The view from the Wildbranch Writing Workshop: Craftsbury Common.

It seems to me that there are really two types of writer’s events — writing workshops and conferences about writing, the latter usually including a bookfair, publishers’ exhibits, or the like.

The biggest and perhaps best known example of the conference about writing is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, which usually draws at least 5,000 people.  The panels cover a very wide range of writing topics.  For example, I chaired a panel at the NYC AWP conference in early 2008 on “the future of environmental essay.”  Large conferences such as these are excellent venues for attending panels of very well-known writers and visiting (and being overwhelmed by) publishers’ booths.  I can’t recall the number of exhibitors at the bookfair, but it must be well over 400, I bet.  In New York in 2008 and Denver in 2010, the journal I edit — Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments — did/will have a table.  Visiting tables/booths and talking with editorial staff (and sometimes contributors) is the best way to learn about the publication short of actually purchasing it (or, in our case, visiting it online).  Like smaller writer’s conferences, it’s not a venue for submitting work, but rather for identifying publications you’re interested in submitting your work to (whether individual literary journals or book publishers), talking with the editors to get a sense of what they’re interested in for upcoming issues, and rubbing elbows with other inquring writers.

Smaller conferences are not so overwhelming, and often provide a more intimate experience and opportunity for connecting even further with an editor.  I think of this summer’s Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) biennial conference in Victoria, BC.  With perhaps 400 attendees, the panels are smaller and last longer, the panels and events are tailored in this case to a specific set of literature — environmental literature and literary ecocriticism — and there are more opportunities for networking, especially with editors and contributors.  The exhibitor can be much smaller; there were perhaps ten or twelve exhibitors at ASLE, Terrain.org among them.

At both settings, readings are offered.  In the case of AWP, they’re offered both as part of the program and outside of the official event — dozens of them nightly, it seems.  For example, in Denver in April 2010, Terrain.org is teaming up with Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing to host a reading not affiliated with AWP but which, we hope, will draw fans of those publications and people interested in place-based literature — even as it will conflict with one of AWP’s big poetry readings.  At ASLE, on the other hand, it seemed appropriate not to schedule an off-site reading but rather to attend the two or three scheduled evening readings.

At the other end of the spectrum, though still related of course, are writing workshops.  Staying in the environmental literature genre, I think here of the Wildbranch Writing Workshop held over a week each summer in northern Vermont.  While one or two journals may be represented — Orion magazine (the Orion Society) is the primary sponsor, so always participates, and sometimes editors of other journals attend either as speakers or students (that was my experience in the summer of 2007) — there is little opportunity for editorial interaction unless it’s part of the workshop.  At Wildbranch, however, that opportunity is a distinct and important part of the overall workshop experience: the year I attended, Orion’s editor-in-chief Chip Blake agreed to read every participant’s submission and provide individual feedback.  That’s not common, I think, but is certainly valuable.  What also isn’t common except at workshops like Wildbranch is the ability for students to meet with and really hang out with the instructors.  I had the good fortune of spending time with Scott Russell Sanders and Sandra Steingraber, two writers/activists whose work I much admire.  I’ve kept in touch with both of them.  It’s true that as an editor myself I may have more opportunity to maintain our contact, but that the opportunity is there in the first place is pretty special.  I doubt you dine at every meal with your instructor and other participants, including sponsoring magazine editors, at most workshops.  But every writing workshop has some unique opportunity, I’d wager, and I suspect all of them develop a sense of community among the students that may continue well after the workshop.

So is there value in either or both of these approaches — the writer’s conference versus the writing workshop?  Definitely.  At the conference, the writer receives broad exposure to publications and access to an array of panels across genres but doesn’t receive instruction.  The opportunities to meet publishers at booths/tables are many.  At the workshop, the writer receives individual (small group, really) instruction and usually may sit on a few panels offered when the instructor-led workshops are not in session.  Exposure to publishers and editors is limited, though.  It’s really a question of what the writer is after.  For me personally, they all offer benefits, but I can only go to so many larger writer’s conferences like AWP, especially if I’m not one of the presenters.  And I could only attend a writing workshop (mainly due to cost and, at a full week often, time off) every now and then.  But Wildbranch for me was incredibly beneficial and affirming.  And the ASLE conference, held every other year, is an event I plan not to miss if I can help it.  I don’t feel much community at AWP because of its vast size, but I definitely do at ASLE and Wildbranch.

Comments (0)

By Simmons Buntin, July 27, 2009 5:28 am

By Joshua David Bellin

From June 22 to July 17, I was one of 25 college and university faculty to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on Aldo Leopold. Titled “‘A Fierce Green Fire at 100’: Aldo Leopold and the Roots of Environmental Ethics,” the institute commemorated the 100-year anniversary of Leopold’s arrival in Arizona to take up his first position with the United States Forest Service. During the course of the four weeks, we heard from experts in the field; traveled to locations Leopold visited during his time in the Southwest; discussed and debated Leopold’s legacy in the disciplines of environmental ethics, wildlife ecology, conservation biology, and environmental literature; and (occasionally) unwound over a few beers. It was an exhausting, invigorating, exhilarating experience, one that taught me loads about Leopold and, more importantly, about the distance we have yet to travel to approach the ideal he voiced sixty years ago in “The Land Ethic,” his signature essay from A Sand County Almanac (1949): “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Aldo Leopold

The institute took place in Prescott, Arizona (pronounced like British “waistcoat”), a small town that, at an elevation of 5,300 feet, provides a summertime refuge from the brutal heat of Phoenix. “Everybody’s Hometown,” banners on lampposts announce; the ubiquitous ravens who cackle imperiously from atop these perches seem to agree. The former state capitol of Arizona, Prescott now offers mostly tourist attractions, including remnants of a once-famous Whiskey Row, plenty of restaurants and antique shops, and (so they say) the world’s oldest rodeo. July is monsoon season, when moisture from the Sea of Cortez gets sucked up into the sky and dumped on the land in storms of amazing suddenness and ferocity. West of town Thumb Butte, haven for nesting peregrines, floats in the blue distance. Our accommodations were provided by Prescott College, an experimental school founded in the 1960s that offers a robust environmental curriculum, recycled granite in the bathrooms, herds of wild javelinas wandering the alleyways between dorms, and neither grades nor credits. Our main classroom, in the Sharlot Hall regional history museum, was an unfinished cement studio space with a horrendous echo and squealing chairs; considering that the museum now faces the loss of all state funding due to Arizona’s budget crisis, though, the director and staff were incredibly generous in permitting us to take over their grounds for a month.

The institute’s participants were a diverse group, both regionally and by discipline. Philosophers were particularly well represented (all of them, unlike me, sporting enviable heads of hair; maybe philosophical reflection encourages follicle retention). But there were also faculty from my own disciplines of Literature and American Studies, as well as from Biology, Religious Studies, Political Science, Women’s Studies, and even, in the case of a woman who teaches in Hawaii, Dance. The disciplinary diversity, unfortunately, wasn’t matched by much visible ethnic diversity, though one woman did tell me she’s part-Cherokee. Inevitably, our discussions turned to issues of environmental justice, something Leopold, surrounded though he was by Native and Hispanic populations, barely touched on, and something our own ethnic makeup suggested still needs to be vigorously addressed. We also talked about hunting — another Leopold passion that the vegetarians in the group, myself included, wrestled mightily to understand as a form of love for the wild — as well as about the question of Leopold’s radicalism (or lack thereof), the applicability of his land ethic to the global-scale environmental crises we now face, the proliferation of land ethics in such contemporary settings as urban gardens and the slow foods movement, and much more. The faculty who steered us through these subjects represented the cream of the Leopold crop: biographer Curt Meine, a cheerful and energetic soul who offered me an impromptu lesson in reading land health during an interminable bus ride to Leopold’s rookie post of Springerville, Arizona; Julianne Newton, whose own biography of Leopold emphasizes the development of his ecological thinking; J. Baird Callicott, the dean of environmental ethics, who almost single-handedly put Leopold on the map for philosophers initially inclined to dismiss him as a mere government functionary unworthy of joining their arcane brotherhood; and in the final week, author Scott Russell Sanders, whose writings, including his recent, marvelous A Conservationist Manifesto (reviewed in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org), have earned him a spot in the Leopold tradition of environmentalist philosophy and prophecy. By month’s end, all of us had designed or retooled syllabi that we’ll be taking home to our own campuses, as well as making publicly available on the website of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. If in so doing we can spread the gospel of Leopold to as wide and diverse an audience as possible, the institute will have served its purpose.

I’ve always respected Leopold as both a thinker and writer, but the institute gave me a greater appreciation both for the quality of his ideas and for the lengthy process by which he achieved their full flowering. When he first arrived in the Southwest, Leopold was a faithful disciple of the Progressive-era utilitarianism preached by the head of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, who saw timber as a “crop” to be managed solely for commercial purposes. Only gradually, over decades of observation, reflection, communication with leaders in the emerging field of ecology, object lessons in the United States and abroad, and more than his fair share of mistakes and missteps, did Leopold emerge as the revolutionary thinker who emphasized the need for humans to live harmoniously with the natural world, to reject economic profit as the sole measure of the land’s value, to view the biota as a unified whole with which humans should tamper only reluctantly, and to understand ourselves as a part of that unity, linked to the land in material, historical, ethical, and spiritual ways. The Southwest proved a fertile starting-point for Leopold’s development, his tutorship in the region’s fragile ecosystems making him particularly alert to the human impact on the land. It was also in the Southwest that the seeds were sown for his most dramatic about-face: his revolution from advocate of predator eradication to defender of wolves and grizzlies as essential members of the land community. In a stunning confessional from his most famous short essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold recounts the epiphany he experienced upon the downing of a mother wolf:

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Leopold exaggerates and compresses his revelation here; though a letter has recently surfaced proving that he did indeed shoot two timber wolves during his first year in Arizona, it would be decades before he seriously reconsidered the wisdom of predator-eradication programs. (Indeed, in the letter itself, he laments not the death of the wolves but the loss of his pipe.) But as Scott Sanders pointed out, the fact that Leopold retells this incident in a way that isn’t literally true enables him to evoke its deeper truth: the need for each of us to see the land as a living whole, worthy of our love and respect. In this sense, Leopold provides a powerful example for students and for all of us who struggle to meet the environmental challenges of our time: rather than assuming that he knew what was best for the earth, he allowed that far older and wiser teacher to instruct him in its ways.

In Leopold’s essay “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” written in 1923 but unpublished until 1979, some 30 years after his death, he places the American experiment in its historical context and finds occasion for judgment and regret: “Five races — five cultures — have flourished here. We may truthfully say of our four predecessors that they left the earth alive, undamaged. Is it possibly a proper question for us to consider what the sixth shall say about us?” I hold this question in my mind as I return to my home to teach, to raise my children, and to work for the restoration and revitalization of the land.

Joshua David Bellin with his children at the Grand Canyon, a not-too-far drive from Prescott, Arizona.

About the Blogger

Joshua David Bellin teaches American, Native American, and Environmental Literature at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. Having published three scholarly books and numerous articles in these fields, he has recently taken a break from academic writing to focus on fiction and creative nonfiction. Under the pen name of J. David Bell, he has published in such periodicals as Word Catalyst, SNReview, Gander Press Review, Queen City Review, and the upcoming issue of Terrain.org.

Comments (0)

By Simmons Buntin, May 21, 2009 9:26 pm

If you haven’t yet seen it, then you need to do yourself a favor and head out to your local literary bookstore, or order online, the latest copy of The Georgia Review (Spring 2009).

Among many other outstanding contributions, it includes “Culture and the Environment — A Conversation in Five Essays:” Scott Russell Sanders (Simplicity and Sanity), Reg Saner (Sweet Reason, Global Swarming), David Gessner (Against Simplicity), Lauret Savoy (Pieces toward a Just Whole), and Alison Hawthorne Deming (Culture, Biology, and Emergence).

From The Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey’s introduction:

The keynote work, Scott Russell Sanders’s “Simplicity and Sanity,” puts forward a wide-ranging examination of humankind’s relationship to the natural world and argues for its radical overhaul.

Reg Saner’s “Sweet Reason, Global Swarming” embraces Sanders’ fears for the literal survival of the human race but gives the argument a different center — one that conjures a dark figure from all of our high school history classes, Thomas Malthus, whose lone claim to renown is a theory we have let slip into the background while confronting myriad more immediate-seeming dangers.

David Gessner then confronts Sanders with “Against Simplicity: A Few Words for Complexity, Slippiness and Joy,” claiming that his sometime-mentor/idol may be entering the fray with the wrong weapon in hand.

Lauret Edith Savoy, in “Pieces toward a Just Whole,” initially lauds Sanders’ position but concentrates the bulk of her essay on certain racial and economic factors that she believes are being overlooked in virtually all discussions of environmental catastrophe.

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Culture, Biology, Emergence,” the most sweeping of the five essays in this conjured five-way conversation, moves across eons of time and many disciplines of study to reach a conclusion that is, paradoxically, more desparate and more hopeful than those presented by her four compatriots.

If you are familiar with The Georgia Review (which has no relation to Terrain.org though many of the contributors mentioned above appear in our online pages), then you know that its contributions are of the highest quality. With this environmentally focused issue, the journal clarifies the focus by some of our foremost thinkers and writers, literary or otherwise.

We encourage you to check it out.