Bringing Place to the Page: Writing about Landscape, Home, and Travel

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Getting feedback that your descriptions meander or the plot is hard to find–but the backdrop is important to understand the story? Join this multiple Best American Essays-selected and prize-winning author to approach place creatively and even as a character itself, which can enliven and enrich our stories.

The market for creative nonfiction continues to show interest in books that grapple with place and environment, especially those that combine the personal with an external gaze. Books like H Is for Hawk, Braiding Sweetgrass, The Hidden Life of Trees, Lab Girl, and Underland have found massive readerships among both literary and general audiences by engaging with places near and far and revealing complex textures and connections everywhere.

Writing about place without descending into self-satisfied nostalgia or eco-punditry is a balancing act and art. This webinar offers insight into how to transform perceptions into pages and help readers experience approximations of landscape in your nonfiction.

In this webinar, you will:

• EXPLORE writing about place and environment as characters in themselves–ones that deepen your work on the page.
• CONSIDER urban vs. wilderness, home vs. away, and environments in flux, in order to write compelling and persuasive narratives that are evocative and concrete.
• ENGAGE landscapes as a writer. What are the risks of writing about a specific place? How can you avoid environmental preachiness and nostalgia?

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

About The Presenter

Clinton Crockett Peters is an assistant professor of creative writing at Berry College, the world’s largest college (27,000 acres). He is the author of Pandora’s Garden (2018), a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and Mountain Madness (2021), both from the University of Georgia Press.

He appears in Best American Essays 2020 and has been noted six times in the Best American series. He’s received prizes from the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Columbia Journal. His creative nonfiction appears in Orion, the Southern Review, Hotel Amerika, the Threepenny Review, Fourth Genre, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.

He holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and a PhD from the University of North Texas. In previous lives, he was an outdoor wilderness guide, an English teacher in Kosuge Village, Japan (population: 900), and a radio DJ.