Writing in Nature

Andy Couturier

Friday, October 28, 2011
9 a.m.-12 noon
$20 members / $25 non-members
Reservations required; space is limited
Pre-registration is closed.  Limited space available at the door.

The design and care of a Japanese garden helps us tune and focus our attention to the patterns and invitations of nature. The word in Japanese, “tei-en” is constructed from two Kanji characters, one hinting more at the wildness of untamed and exuberant nature, and the other for the human-tended nature of a garden. It is thus that this dynamic interaction, this cusp between the human world of culture and the more-than-human world of the wild earth, is invoked by a well-designed garden. Learning about this experientially, through our writing, is one of the best ways to understand it deeply within ourselves. We too, as humans, are constantly passing back and forth across this osmotic barrier.  In this workshop we will heighten our perception of that movement, and live more fully in both worlds.

Too often writing pulls us out of our present experience and disconnects us from the luminous natural world. It doesn’t need to be so. In fact, we can actually use writing to heighten our perceptions and sensitivities to the many “beings” that call to us in nature. Our animal bodies have been tuned for thousands of generations for the most acute perception of the world, and we can use writing to renew that connection.

Join us for a short tasting of writing techniques to help hone our innate human capacities for language to engage more vitally with the natural world around us.

Andy Couturier is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and the author of Writing Open the Mind. He has contributed to Adbusters, MIT Press, The Oakland Tribune, The Japan Times, Kyoto Journal, Creative Nonfiction, and The North American Review. Couturier lived in Japan for four years where he taught, was a journalist, and worked on environmental causes. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and runs a center for courses in writing: The Opening.