How do we write about the nonhuman during this era we are calling the anthropocene? How do we navigate our relationship with nature in a highly technological moment? Is it our duty to try to speak for nature in a moment of environmental crisis? Join Jennifer Boyden who thinks deeply about trees, Meghan O'Gieblyn who is fascinated with AI, and Heather Swan who has an ongoing love affair with bees as they share some of their writing and have a conversation about how all of these issues intersect.
Jennifer Boyden’s debut novel, The Chief of Rally Tree (Skyhorse Publishing) was awarded the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature for its investigation of tree consciousness, hidden lives, and lives yet to be discovered so they can be lived. Jennifer is also author of two books of poetry, The Declarable Future (awarded The Four Lakes Prize in Poetry) and The Mouths of Grazing Things (winner of The Brittingham Prize in Poetry), both with University of Wisconsin Press. As a PEN Northwest Wilderness Writing Resident, she lived and wrote for a year of unparalleled solitude in a remote region of the Rogue River in southern Oregon. Jennifer serves on the faculties of Spring Street International School and Eastern Oregon University's low-residency MFA program. She lives on an island in Washington state with her family and spends afternoons with their donkeys reading installments of The Odyssey.
Meghan O’Gieblyn is the author of God, Human, Animal, Machine (2021) and Interior States (2018), which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Wired, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum, n+1, The Believer, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and her work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays 2017 and The Contemporary American Essay (2021). She also writes the “Cloud Support” advice column for Wired.
Heather Swan's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Raleigh Review, Midwestern Gothic, Basalt, and Cream City Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, ISLE, Resilience Journal, About Place, and Edge Effects. Her creative nonfiction book, Where Honeybees Thrive, was published by Penn State Press in 2017 and was awarded the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She earned her MFA in poetry and Ph.D. in English and Environmental Studies at University of Wisconsin Madison, where she was also the recipient of the August Derleth Award for Poetry and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship in Poetry.
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