This Mother’s Day weekend, celebrate Mother Earth with two days focused on writing about nature and the environment with leading voices in the field. Join us at the Landmark Resort in Egg Harbor for the 2025 Writing On The Door Conference: Writing the World.

Whether you are a poet, nonfiction writer, novelist, essayist, journalist, or write for an environmental organization, this conference has plenty to offer you. Our celebrated faculty will provide you with insight into writing about the world around you and finding a home for your writing.

Our keynote speakers are Dan Egan, author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes and The Devil’s Element and Daniel Slager, Publisher and Chief Executive Officer of Milkweed Editions, one of the country’s leading literary non-profit presses that is dedicated to publishing works about the enivornment, including Robin Wall Kimmerer’s classic Braiding Sweetgrass. Other faculty members include former Wisconsin Poets Laureate Kimberly Blaeser and Nicholas Gulig; prose writers Tamara Dean, Anna Farro Henderson, Constance Malloy, and Jill Stukenberg.

The conference will feature four tracks:

• Track A: Prose
• Track B: Poetry
• Track C: Journalism/Advocacy/Organizational Writing
• Track D: Hike and Writes at various community locations. Space is limited for these sessions and will be given on a first-come, first-served basis.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE

FRIDAY, MAY 9

9:00 – 10:15 am: Keynote Conversation with Dan Egan

10:30 am – noon: Breakout Sessions

Track A: Question: What Happens When the Dolphin Thinks She’s a Heron? Answer: An Internal Climate Crisis with Constance Malloy.

Track B: “Who Saved It? –” Placing the World in Poems with Caryl Pagel

Track C: Building Confidence in Writing with Lindsey Taylor

Track D: Art/Speaks with Carrie and Peter Sherrill

1:30 pm – 2:45 pm: Panel Discussion: Writing the Nature of the Door with Kathleen Harris, Coggin Heeringa, Charlotte Lukes, and Alessandra Rolffs

3:00 – 4:30 pm: Breakout Sessions

Track A: Writing from a Changing Place with Tamara Dean

Track B: Ghost Work: Fieldnotes Towards a Midwestern Eco-Poetics of Haunting with Nicholas Gulig

Track C: Using Storytelling to Communicate Science with Anna Farro Henderson

Track D: Hike and Write with Door County Land Trust

SATURDAY, MAY 10

9 am – 10:15 am: Keynote Conversation with Daniel Slager

10:30 am – noon: Breakout Sessions

Track A: Writing Place for Eco- and Other Fictions with Jill Stukenberg

Track B: Queering Nature with Michael Walsh

Track C: The Power of Image in Writing about Nature and the Environment to Create a Sensory and Emotional Connection that Results in Action with Chera Van Falcon Burg

Track D: Hike and Write with The Ridges Nature Sanctuary

1:30 – 2:45 pm: Panel Discussion: Eco-Poetics with Kimberly Blaeser, Nicholas Gulig, Caryl Pagel, and Michael Walsh

3:00 – 4:30 pm: Breakout Sessions

Track A: Writing About Home, the Natural World, and the Spirit of Place with Alison Townsend

Track B: Poetry with Kimberly Blaeser

Track C: Writing Nature on the Job and Beyond with Sara Dennison, Libby Humphries, and Alessandra Rolffs

Track D: Hike and Write at Write On

SPECIAL SESSIONS

Bird Watching with Mike Grimm, 6:30 – 8:00 am Friday and Saturday. Space is limited and registration is required. To register for Friday’s session, please click here. To register for Saturday’s session, please click here.

BREAKOUT SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

FRIDAY, MAY 9, 10:30 am – noon

Track A: Question: What Happens When the Dolphin Thinks She’s a Heron? Answer: An Internal Climate Crisis with Constance Malloy

How does nature move? How do you move through nature? How does nature move you? A deep investigation of these questions is fundamental to the process of infusing fiction with the natural world. With the help of selected readings, writing prompts, meditation, small group discussions, and a bit of whimsy, this session will focus on the powerful tool nature can be for the fiction writer in creating and shaping both character and plot.

Track B: “Who Saved It? –” Placing the World in Poems with Caryl Pagel

In 1967, Lorine Niedecker wrote “Wintergreen Ridge,” a poem based on a walk she took through the Ridges Sanctuary in Door County, which tethered the particulars of her immediate visual surroundings to images of local conservationist activism, evolutionary history, and American politics during the Vietnam War. In this generative writing session, we’ll use Niedecker’s poem as a prompt for composing precise, observation-based lines about our environment that lead outward into the world. All writers are welcome; participants will also leave with a list of recommended reading.

Track C: Building Confidence in Writing with Lindsey Taylor

Join this interactive, engaging writing workshop that aims to help writers of all experience levels feel welcome in the writing space and let their creativity bloom. Imposter syndrome can be a common experience among writers, with thoughts like “I’m not a real writer” restricting our creative potential. Lindsey believes that anyone who wants to be a writer already is one just by putting words on the page. Lindsey will share her own story as a writer (including periods of her life where she doubted she was “good enough”) and lead writing activities to help participants build confidence in their own writing.

Track D: Art/Speaks with Carrie and Peter Sherrill

Poets Carrie and Peter Sherrill lead a session on ekphrasis combining nature and art. Held at the beautiful sculpture garden of Edgewood Orchard Gallery, participants will be inspired by the interaction of nature and art. Space is limited to 15; to register, please click here.

FRIDAY, MAY 9, 3:00 – 4:30 pm

Track A: Writing from a Changing Place with Tamara Dean

Writing can help us honor and attend to a beloved place that’s changing due to extreme weather, disaster, or development. It can help us reconcile with those changes and deepen our connections with the place and its inhabitants. Writing From a Changing Place will guide you to depict a cherished landscape in vivid, compelling ways. You’ll learn techniques for conveying experiences and emotions in scenes and descriptions that will affect readers deeply. You’ll be invited to examine the personal and profound implications of nature’s changes. You’ll leave the workshop with a draft that you can develop further into a story, essay, poem, or longer work about the landscape that speaks to your heart. Writers working in all genres and at any level are welcome. We won’t exchange feedback on drafts, but we’ll gather in a spirit of curiosity and generosity to support our own and each other’s writing.

Track B: GHOST WORK: Fieldnotes Toward a Midwestern Eco-Poetics of Haunting with Nicholas Gulig

Centered as we are in the middle of the country, how might Midwesterners write of the world around us beyond the all too human limits of the self?  Concerned as much with form as subject, in this session, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Nicholas Gulig will discuss John Keats’ notion of negative capability, positioning the metaphor of the ghost as a lens through which to reach for a language of ecological, lyrical relation.

Track C: Using Storytelling to Communicate Science with Anna Farro Henderson

As the world rapidly changes, engaging new and broader audiences on topics of science, the environment, and technology becomes increasingly urgent. In this session, we will explore ways to use and incorporate elements of storytelling craft. Through short lectures, excerpts from a range of authors, and writing exercises, we will explore and experiment with voice, world building, structure, and ways to integrate research materials into our creative process.

Track D: Hike and Write with Sara Dennison and Jane Whitney

Explore the Door County Land Trust preserve through hiking and writing. Space is limited to 15; to register, please click here.

SATURDAY, MAY 10, 10:30 am – noon

Track A: Writing Place, for Eco and Other Fictions with Jill Stukenberg

Setting and background most often conjure stasis. We think of the painted scenery that lines the stage of the “empty” space behind figures in a painting. But how and why can centering “place” as dynamic be invigorating for our fiction? How does centering place, both built and natural environments, overlap with concepts of Eco-fiction? Explore prose writing in this breakout session–with discussion, writing exercises, and sharing.

Track B: Queering Nature with Michael Walsh

In this generative break-out session open to writers of all genres, we will look at nature askance. What does that mean? In short writing exercises across genres, we will ask ourselves about the visceral ways in which we are part of the world around us. Looking askance in this way, we will animalize, botanize and mineralize ourselves. On the other hand, we will also consider how strange other flora and fauna are compared to our own biologies. In short exercises we’ll describe what’s queer about all kinds of creatures, especially, weather-permitting, those we find outside on the grounds.  

Track C: The Power of Image in Writing About Nature and the Environment to Create a Sensory and Emotional Connection that Results in Action with Chera Van Falcon Burg

Crafting effective writing about nature and the environment has become more challenging than ever as the state of the environment continues to decline and measures put in place to mitigate environmental destruction by world governments are consistently not met, which causes anxiety to increase in ourselves and our communities. At the same time, we hold passionate, positive feelings about the beauty and mystery of the natural world. Valuing both the external landscape of the environment and our internal landscape of complex emotions is critical to developing new ways of perceiving, thinking, and re-imagining stories and solutions that inform our writing. Historically, essays, stories, and poems have been written to protect the land, to make others aware of environmental issues, and to energize people to action. Activist-writing has worked and has created countless other activists. In this session, we will consider how effective writing uses image at its center to engage the reader’s five senses and allows them to imagine themselves physically and emotionally in a particular landscape. We will look at how images create story and characters drawn from the land that evoke meaning and activates feelings in the reader that culminate in the message that place, and our response to place, matters, which leads to action.

Track D: Hike and Write at The Ridges Sanctuary with Libby Humphries

Explore The Ridges Sanctuary through hiking and writing. Space is limited to 15; to register, please click here.

SATURDAY, MAY 10, 3:00 – 4:30 pm

Track A: Writing About Home, the Natural World, and the Spirit of Place with Alison Townsend
As Wendell Berry once said, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” Place, especially one that we identify as “home ground,” is both powerful and mysterious, shaping our lives, identities, and spirits. What we write about place, be it native or adopted, helps us both to understand ourselves and to know the natural world more deeply. In this interactive session we’ll explore ways of writing about homeplaces and personal landscapes. We’ll consider how such places shape us, and what they teach us about ourselves and the more-than-human world. After a brief talk and excerpts from Townsend’s memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home, we’ll engage in a series of generative writing exercises aimed at (1) defining home ground, (2) evoking and describing it, and (3) exploring landscape as mirror of self. Participants will come away with two or three starts, instructions for keeping place journals, and a bibliography of books on writing about place.

Track B: Poetry with Kimberly Blaeser

Track C: Writing About Nature on the Job and Beyond: Panel Discussion with nonprofit professionals who write about nature and the environment for their work and for their pleasure

Track D: Hike and Write at Write On, Door County with Alison Haus

Discover the woods and fields of Write On through hiking and writing. Space is limited to 15; to register, please click here.

PRESENTER BIOS

Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her poetry collections include Ancient Light (2024), Copper Yearning (2019), and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020). An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist. She is Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee, 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College, and MFA faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts.Blaeser’s honors include the Zona Gale Short Fiction Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.

Tamara Dean is the author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Guardian, Orion, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is also the author of The Human-Powered Home. Her essay, “Safer Than Childbirth,” received a 2024 Pushcart Prize Special Mention and “Slow Blues” was named a 2021 National Magazine Award finalist. She has served on the boards of regional and statewide organizations devoted to protecting Wisconsin’s land and water. She teaches writing independently and through writing centers across the nation. More at www.tamaradean.media.

Dan Egan for many years covered the Great Lakes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Now he writes occasional long-form pieces about climate change for national media outlets, including the New York Times, and is a senior water policy fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences. He is the author of The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance and the New York Times best seller The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he has won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, the John B. Oakes Award, the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, he lives in Milwaukee with his wife and children.

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. A 2011 Fulbright Fellow, Gulig has received numerous other accolades for his work including the Rushkin Art Club Poetry Award, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, the Grist ProForma Award, and the CSU Open Book Poetry Prize. He serves as the 2023-24 Poet Laureate of the state of Wisconsin. He is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives with his wife and two daughters in Fort Atkinson.

Anna Farro Henderson is a PhD  climate scientist who worked as an advisor in the U.S. Senate and to the Minnesota Governor. Her book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in October of 2024. Her publications have appeared in River Teeth, The Kenyon Review, and The Normal School, among others, some under the name E.A. Farro. She has been the recipient of Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and Everwood Farmstead residency, and the Terrain.org’s 2023 fiction contest, among others. She teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Charlotte Lukes was born in Milwaukee. She married Roy Lukes in May of 1972 and began studying nature at The Ridges Sanctuary that summer when she and Roy lived in the Upper Rangelight. She also began her study of wild mushrooms that year and has taught classes and led field trips in many areas of northeastern Wisconsin since 1976. Her Door County list of species identified stands at 611. Over 400 of these will be added to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Cofrin Center for Biodiversity’s website within the next year. When Roy became ill in 2014, Charlotte took over writing his Door to Nature column for the Peninsula Pulse and Door County Living. 

Constance Malloy is the author of Tornado Dreams: A Memoir and Born of Water, a speculative hybrid novelette. Creator of The Burning Hearth, a blog dedicated to interviewing writers, she has enjoyed interviewing many authors, including Ursula K. LeGuin’s biographer, Julie Phillips, in her “Echoes of LeGuin” series, and David Naimon in her “Circling Saturn with David Naimon” series. A former professional dancer and instructor, she can often be found waltzing about nature in the woods or by the river. She resides in Milwaukee with her husband and daughter, and a resident hawk she calls Nahali. Find her at constancemalloy.com. 

Caryl Pagel is the author of four books, most recently Free Clean Fill Dirt (poetry, University of Akron Press) and Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays, FC2). She is a publisher and editor at Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Pagel teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program. She is the recipient of the 2025 Lorine Niedecker Fellowship and is working on a book about Niedecker and the Great Lakes.

Alesandra Rolffs is the executive director of Gathering Ground, a nonprofit with the mission to connect learners of all ages to nature, community and healthy food through sustainable farming education on Washington Island. She is also a writer, mother of two boys, and she helps operate Hoot Blossom, a flower and veggie farm, with her husband. Her poetry and essays have been published in The Southern Review, Spillway, About Place Journal and elsewhere. Her column Everyday Nature is published in the Washington Island Observer. She holds a PhD in Eco-Literature from UW-Milwaukee and MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. 

Daniel Slager is the publisher & CEO of Milkweed Editions. Prior to joining Milkweed as editor-in-chief in 2005, he was an editor at Harcourt Trade Publishers in New York. Prior to joining Harcourt, he was the associate editor of Grand Street, a leading quarterly magazine of literature and fine arts. Slager is also a widely published translator from the German. His translations of texts by writers such as Marcel Beyer, Durs Grünbein, Felicitas Hoppe, Dorothea Dieckmann, and Terézia Mora have marked these authors’ first publication in the United States. His most recent book-length translation was Auguste Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke, which was published by Archipelago Press in 2004, and awarded the American Translator Association’s Ungar Prize in 2005. Slager serves on the Boards of Directors for the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, Motionpoems, and Open Book, as well as on the Advisory Board for Archipelago Books, an independent publishing house in New York.

Jill Stukenberg grew up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. She is now Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and co-editor of Midwest Review. Her novel, News of the Air, won the Big Moose prize from Black Lawrence Press and was published in 2022.

Lindsey Taylor is a writer, conservationist, and adventurer. After graduating from Gustavus Adolphus College with a degree in Environmental Biology, she spent four years working and traveling seasonally in Alaska, Colorado, and New Zealand, and shared her stories on her website, curiousitychroniclesblog.com. Lindsey writes to process and learn from her life experiences, to connect with others, and to inspire change. She returned home to the midwest to complete the M.S. Environmental Conservation degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lindsey is the Conservation Coordinator at the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, a non-profit based in Madison that protects our state’s land, waters, and wildlife by providing funding, leading partnerships, and connecting all people to nature. She lives in Madison with her husband, John, and goofy shepherd-retriever dog, Sylvie.

Alison Townsend is the author of a memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home, which was shortlisted for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. She is also the author of two books of poetry, Persephone in America and The Blue Dress, and a short volume of prose, The Persistence of Rivers. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in journals such as About Place, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review, and Under the Sun, and have been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays. Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin- Whitewater, she lives on four acres of prairie and oak savanna outside Madison.  

Chera Van Falcon Burg is a poet, filmmaker, and psychologist. Her debut book of poetry, What We Can See, was published in 2024. Her poems focus on the natural world and our place in it. Chera also produced and co-wrote the award-winning film, Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction, about the drivers of the current mass extinction crisis and the cultural and psychological underpinnings that contribute to it. The film won numerous awards, including the Best Science Communication Film Award at New Zealand’s Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival, and Chera was awarded the Humanitarian Award from the Accolade Global Film Competition as producer. As an activist, Chera was executive director of a non-profit environmental organization and presented at a conference on climate change at the United Nations. She has a doctorate in psychology, was a professor of psychology, published in eco-psychology journals, has a psychology practice with an emphasis on Jungian and depth psychology, and was a psychologist/supervisor at San Quentin State Prison, where she developed a psychology doctoral internship program. 

Michael Walsh is the author of The Dirt Riddles, which received the Miller Williams Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, as well as Creep Love, a 2022 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. Most recently, Autumn House Press published Queer Nature, the first eco-queer American poetry anthology and a 2023 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Anthologies. Living in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, Michael is developing Queer Nature teachings and workshops.