In an interview in Edge Effects, Robin Wall Kimmerer stated, “Gary Nabhan has said, as we try to heal the earth with restoration, with ecological restoration, that’s well and good but what we really need to do is re-story-ation. We need to tell ourselves a different story about our relationship to place. That’s where I think creation stories, either from antiquity or the creation stories we are in the process of writing today about our relationship to place, really matter. They can become a compass for us.”
We, as humans, are more than our birth certificates and socioeconomic background. We, as writers, are more than our rationalizations. As both humans and writers, we are all at once artists, dreamers, mythmakers, and visionaries. In this poetry workshop, we will explore the importance of origin stories (“ethnoautobiography”), commune with plants, discover poems by poets writing about place, memory and origins, and use prompts to approach and discover our own. We will read excerpts and poems by Lorine Niedecker, Joy Harjo, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and M. Scott Momaday, among others.
