Thinkingwith: writing strategies for reconnecting to earth
Our current media landscape seems hooked on a doom loop, an apocalyptic dream of human self-annihilation from collapsing nation states and anarchy to climate change to AI terminators, to genocidal warmongering. In order to avoid going down with that ship, we, as humans, are going to need to flip the script, to learn to think differently.
This lab will focus on writing strategies, applicable for poetry or prose, for breaking the spell that objectifies and cuts us off from the earth and from place and all the living beings that we (often) obliviously live in relationship with. We’ll do that by intentionally widening the socially-imposed conventions of “normal” perception via some minor alterations to our daily writing practices.
As a trail guide in this 5-week excursion, we’ll read through the first section of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth by the late herbalist and self-described “Bardic Naturalist” of the Gaian movement, Stephen Harrod Buhner as well as writing by Goertha, Gertrude Stein, Francis Ponge, Will Alexander, Bernadette Mayer, Italo Calvino and more.
Sundays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
February 23 – March 23, 2025
February 23
March 2, 9, 16, & 23