Writing City Nature, Writing the City Self: A Workshop with Rajiv Mohabir

Writing about the environment is not the province of the rich, the country-dwelling, and the white poet. Asian American poets and writers have been expanding their ideas of the natural world to be expansive, including human-made structure and infrastructures as being natural. They write starting with where they are located. In this three-hour workshop you will explore place-based writing the environment in the natural world of New York City and how reflections of the self echo our own attitudes towards how we regard the “natural world.” Together, we will consider race, settler colonialism, capitalism, ecological collapse, and restoration as well as how poets have answered, re-answered, and rewritten the central questions of nature writing today. With this as a sigil, in our time together, you will draft at least one new poem or piece of short prose.