Modules

Writing Nature: Ecology, Place, Memoir (Creative Writing) (EASM156)

30 credits

Writing about nature, ecology and place has flourished over the past twenty or so years, both in prose non-fiction, fiction and in poetry. New Nature Writing often combines memoir with an attentive exploration of place that reveals new metaphors for the human/nature relationship. Sometimes these centre on the transformative effects of landscape activities like swimming, walking or hawking, or undertake cultural cartography and psychogeographical readings of sites.

Equally, during this period, writers have critiqued our anthropocentric attitudes towards the natural environment and sought to shift us towards a more sustainable sense of ‘species consciousness’ and to question the ideas that have informed our environmental exploitation of the planet.

By studying and writing poetry and/or nonfiction within this urgent and rapidly evolving ecological context, you will learn to identify and analyse techniques that will help you write your own complex and ethically-informed relationship to the natural world.

This module is suitable for non-specialist students with skills in creative writing.