Workshop: Elevating the Mundane—celebrating and communicating the everyday aspects of life and living in Nature.
Participants if they wish may email me (swanfall@gmail.com) a couple pages of any nature writing they’ve done and I’ll discuss it at the workshop. If you choose to do this, bring paper copies for the 11 other attendees so they can follow along.
At the workshop we’ll set out a few prompts drawn from the nature around us and take half an hour of so to write and read and discuss.
I’ll cover other topics as time permits, including but not limited to the ff:
· How I write, the nitty gritty of it.
· How I get and develop ideas.
· Shifting the Lens—different ways of seeing.
· The Wind—exploring natural phenomena.
· A Walk in the woods (literally, if time permits).
My aim is that you’ll leave this workshop with something(s) you can develop into a satisfying piece of environmental/nature writing.
Saturday, July 24, 2023:
10:00 AM-4:00 PM
$200. Limited seating!
(All workshop attendees are invited to Tom’s craft talk & reception)
Click here for workshop tickets!
Craft Talk: The Bay is Dead–Long Live the Bay
Fifty Years of Writing the Chesapeake. I’ll weave together my experiences as an environmental/nature writer with short readings that illustrate my evolving life in letters along the shores of my native Chesapeake.
Early in my career I asked a Bay waterman, drifting his gill nets on the tide, “what kind of fish are down there right now?” He replied it was “all accordin’ to what size meshes were woven into his net—one size and it would catch smallish white perch; another and he’d come up with big rockfish…..
So I came to appreciate that ‘seeing’ nature depended on ‘how you sized your meshes’, i.e. what lenses, preconceptions, biases you approached your subject with.
I’ll talk about learning to “think like a watershed”, influenced more by beavers than writing workshops; about the experiences that shaped my thinking and seem to ring truest and best after a lifetime of observation.
Tom Horton’s Craft Talk
Saturday, August 1, 2023: 5:00 PM
$20. Limited seating!
Click here for craft talk tickets!
Tom’s talk will be followed by a reception and buffet dinner
Tom Horton
is an Eastern Shore Native who was the Baltimore Sun’s environmental reporter and columnist between 1972 and 2006. He is author of several books on Chesapeake Bay. His writing has taken him from the Amazon to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and has appeared in National Geographic, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Sunday Magazine and other publications. He teaches at Salisbury University and writes for the monthly, Bay Journal.