Review: Building a Better World in Your Backyard

When it comes to nonfiction environmental books these days, I feel that we’re reaching “peek dystopia.” Or, at least I hope we are. Because it seems that between books about our warming planet, animal extinction, water shortages and wars, I’m sufficiently enlightened and depressed. What we don’t have enough of these days are hands-on books …

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New Writing Opportunity: Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest

Sponsored by the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at Arizona State University, the contest organizers are “looking for short stories that help us imagine how humans can live within Earth’s planetary boundaries—at the individual level, yes, but more importantly at the level of organizations, communities, and societies, and at the level of a global human civilization.” Work will …

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New Podcast: John Yunker joins The Afterword for a Chat About Environmental Stories

Author and EcoLit Books co-founder John Yunker joined guest Joelle Teachey, executive director of Trees Upstate, for a podcast focused on environmental literature. The Afterword is a podcast devoted to the “future of words” and is hosted by Amy Bowling and Holland Webb. You can listen to it here. You can also subscribe via iTunes.

Writers: Protect yourself, and your work

NOTE: I posted this two weeks ago on the ACP blog and realized that EcoLiterarians might find it useful, so here goes… To be a writer is to be vulnerable. We open ourselves up to criticism and rejection (especially rejection). And, sadly, we also open ourselves to predators — mostly the virtual kind, among them …

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The list of outlets for environmental writing turns 70

As in there are now 70 of them. Thanks for everyone who contributed. We actually just received another contribution today so the list will be turning 71 shortly. The next challenge is how best to organize this list. Alpha sorting is a nice start but I’d love to improve upon it. Any suggestions are welcome…

EcoLit Books Success Story: Marybeth Holleman

Marybeth Holleman

Continuing our series on EcoLit Success Stories, I’m pleased to introduce Marybeth Holleman. Based out of Alaska, she is author of The Heart of the Sound (which was a Siskiyou Prize finalist) and co-author of Among Wolves. Marybeth Holleman is author of The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost, co-author of Among Wolves: Gordon Haber’s …

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Writing Residency Opportunity: The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology

Located a few hours north and west of us here in Ashland, Oregon, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology provides educational courses and residencies to artists. And they’re now open for residency applications. Here’s the call: Calling all painters, novelists, climate activists, photographers, biologists, composers, poets, journalists, architects, film makers, performers, inventors, botanists, curators, …

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Waterston Desert Writing Prize now open for submissions

A unique award for a unique ecosystem… Now starting its sixth year, the Prize annually honors literary nonfiction that illustrates artistic excellence, sensitivity to place, and desert literacy – with the desert as both subject and setting. Inspired by author and poet Ellen Waterston’s love of the high desert of Central Oregon, a region that …

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Book Review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead resists easy categorization. It is a dark comedy, murder mystery, treatise on animal rights, and tribute to English poet William Blake. It is also a feminist portrait of a woman taking stock of the social and cultural values that have shaped all that she …

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The best environmental books we’ve read in 2019

Looking back on the year, I’m happy to see that a novel that made our best books list in 2018 won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize: The Overstory by Richard Powers (and deservedly so). Looking ahead, I believe more and more readers are going to be seeking out the stories and insights that can only be …

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Writing Opportunity: The 2020 Calibre Essay Prize

The Australian Book Review has announced its annual $7,500 Calibre Essay Prize. And while the contest may be located in Australia, it is open to writers everywhere. The list of judges is impressive: J.M. Coetzee, Lisa Gorton, and Peter Rose. Entries are currently open for the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize, worth a total of AU$7,500. The …

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Become a volunteer narrative editor at The Trumpeter

The deep ecology journal The Trumpeter, based out of Canada’s Athabasca University, has openings for volunteer narrative editors, a great opportunity to develop hands-on environmental humanities experience. Applicants for Narrative Editor should have a strong interest in the interdisciplinary environmental humanities (in line with the journal’s mandate), preferably with an affinity for the deep ecological …

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Book Review: Rescue Dogs: Where They Come From, Why They Act the Way They Do, and How to Love Them Well

Pete Paxton hesitated upon hearing the command, “Jump inside.” Inside the trench, which was more than one hundred feet long, six feet wide, and six feet deep, lay dogs in all stages of decomposition. Paxton could see skulls, organs, guts. He saw mosquitoes and maggots. The stench was so putrid, he nearly vomited. But it …

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Nominate your favorite writers for an Emerging Writer Fellowship at the Aspen Summer Words conference

Aspen Words is offering 10 Emerging Writer Fellowships to its annual summer writing conference in, where else, Aspen, Colorado. Not a bad place to a little writing and reading! Here are the details on how to nominate up to three writers in your network: Fellowships are available in fiction, memoir, personal essay, poetry and a new workshop this year, middle grade …

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