Nature Writing at the South Platte

(September 13, 2010 - Littleton, Colorado) - Walk the river with rangers from the Carson Nature Center and then join two distinguished writers for workshops and readings focused on the natural world. Sponsored by the ACC Writers Studio, this event will feature Poet/Fiction Writer Eleanor Swanson and Poet/Essayist Reg Saner. The Nature Writing morning includes a presentation on the ecology and wildlife of the South Platte by the resident Naturalist and a short inspirational nature hike. The cost is $30 for nonstudents and $15 for ACC students.

Dr. Eleanor Swanson’s workshop will be on Reading Nature, Writing the World. After a brief introduction to some contemporary ways of thinking about nature writing, workshop participants will have the opportunity to begin a naturalist/observation journal, write a poem or short prose piece based on their journal entry, and share their work with fellow participants and well as the workshop leader. Workshop participants should bring a small notebook (4x6 is a good size) for their journal entry and poetry or prose drafts. Participants are also welcome and encouraged (but not required) to bring binoculars, digitals cameras and sketchbooks.

The relationship between language and landscape is a marriage of sound and form, an oral geography, a sensual topography. Terry Tempest Williams

Dr. Swanson is a poet, fiction writer and a professor in the English Department at Regis University. Her awards include the A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, a Fiction Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship in Literature (fiction), and first place in the Plum Review Fiction Competition. Her 2003 poetry collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, won the Ruth Stevens Manuscript Competition (NFPS Press) and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Trembling in the Bones, was published in late 2006 by Ghost Road Press. Her first novel, Before the Reef, was recently published by Plain View Press. http://www.eleanorswanson.com/bio.html

Reg Saner, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, will conduct a workshop on Creationism: The Ecotone Made of Words. According to Mr. Saner, quite a few enrollees in a creative writing program dream of an eventual payday bringing money and fame. “Yet a far likelier reward derives from what I whimsically call my kind of creationism. Because our seriously written work changes us by becoming part of what we are, our writing creates us as we create it, “said Mr. Saner. In his talk/reading, he hopes to illustrate how this sort of self-evolution not only can happen if seriously undertaken, but invariably does.

The writings of Mr. Saner are centered by terrain of the American west, our kinship with living things, and our decidedly finite situation in a potentially infinite cosmos. His national honors include the first Walt Whitman Award, an NEA creative writing fellowship, a National Poetry Series choice by Derek Walcott, an award by the Quarterly Review of Literature marking its 45th anniversary, and a residency at the Centro Culturale della Fondazione Rockefeller on Italy’s Lake Como. He has also been the recipient of a Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the State of Colorado, a Hazel Barnes Award from the University of Colorado and a Wallace Stegner Award. In 1999, he was named Boulder’s first Poet Laureate.

The Carson Nature Center and the South Platte Park are located west of Santa Fe Drive along the Platte River bike trail, behind the Aspen Grove Shopping center and across from the Littleton/Mineral Ave Station. The Center offers ecological and wildlife displays and naturalist-lead field trips.

For more information about Writers Studio, email kathryn.winograd@ara;pahoe.edu.