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 poems have appeared in such journals as Terrain, Minding Nature, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, The Hopper, Midwestern Gothic and Cold Mountain, and in many anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin), which was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and Dandelion (Terrapin). She is also a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the Maud Weinshenk Award, the August Derleth Prize for Poetry, and an honorable mention for the Lorine Niedecker Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, will be released in May 2024. She teaches environmental literature and... Read More
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