As conditions on earth get increasingly off-kilter and out of whack, the environment is becoming a defining concern of our time.
This workshop will focus on understanding how to discern the underlying stories in the natural world all around us, and how to write about them with knowledge, sensitivity, and a compelling sense of story-telling.
Whether you’re a poet or a novelist or an independent chronicler, this class will sharpen your sense of how to engage and inform without overwhelming your audience, and the ways to focus, narratively speaking, on responses to environmental stress, whether your own or others.
We’ll draw inspiration and guidance from the writing of journalists, poets, nature writers, novelists, essayists---combining elements of craft with a deeper understanding of the elements around us, undergoing disruption on the one hand, and regaining equilibrium on the other.
Mark Schapiro is an award-winning investigative journalist specializing in the environment. His most recent book, Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply, chronicles the search for seeds to respond to climate disruptions, and investigates the battle to control them.
Previous books include Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk & Calculus on the Frontlines of the Disrupted Global Economy, an investigation into the hidden costs and consequences of climate change; and Exposed: the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, on the public health and economic impacts of the U.S. retreat from toxic chemical protections. His work is also published in Harper's, Yale 360, Mother Jones, The Nation, the Guardian, Bay Nature and elsewhere, and he has turned his stories into tv for FRONTLINE and KQED.
Mark is a Lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and was formerly Senior Correspondent at the Center for Investigative Reporting.
More about Mark: https://seedsofresistance.net