Find new ways of interacting with well-known natural objects

Translating Nature: An Ecopoetic and Print-Making Workshop with Sarah Nance, Nancy Aten, and Dan Collins

Ecopoet Sarah Nance will lead a discussion of ecopoetics using examples from early and contemporary American poets. Participants will practice their own version of ecopoetry by interacting in new ways with well-known natural objects—a pinecone, a leaf, a flower, a small branch. Participants will then use these objects to create a visual interpretation of their poetry using monotype printmaking in a session led by printmakers Nancy Aten and Dan Collins. Please bring your own lunch. Presented in collaboration with Gathering Ground.

NOTE: For best printing, bring a few leaves that you’ve pressed between newsprint under a heavy book for a few days to the workshop.

This program is presented in-person and will be presented largely outside. Tuition for the day-long workshop is $80.00. Write On members receive a 10% discount. To become a member and save, please click here. To register online for this program, please click the button below. For other registration options, please call 920.868.1457. Please read our policy on cancellations and refunds.

Nancy Aten, PLA, ASLA, and Dan Collins, P.E., form the award-winning Landscapes of Place, an ecological restoration and conservation planning firm with projects in Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York. Nancy is a printmaker whose monotypes (unique prints) are inevitably about natural places she knows or wild places she hopes to restore, telling the stories of her ecological restoration practice. Dan creates monotype prints and works in wire and stone that are inspired by the exuberance, grace, and raw beauty of Door County’s natural places.

Sarah Nance grew up in Green Bay and completed her B.A. in English and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an assistant professor in medical humanities at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado. Her work and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Arizona Quarterly, Literature and Medicine, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. A lyric novella was short-listed for Gold Line Press’s chapbook prize. She was the recipient of a Quarry Farm Fellowship in Creative Writing from the Center for Mark Twain Studies in 2020.