John Yunker 
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
A decade ago, not long after moving to Oregon, I traveled to Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park where I entered an old-growth coast redwood forest for the first time. To say it was a moving experience is an understatement. The photographs I took were also an understatement; no picture can capture the enormity of these …
Here’s an opportunity for contributions to a special issue on plant poetics. Submissions are open from November 1st to December 27th. Poems and scholarly essays are invited in response to the following prompt from guest editor John Ryan: A novel area of science called plant cognition is showing us that plants are more than photosynthetic androids or …
A few articles that I bookmarked in the Times over the past two weeks… How Do the New Plant-Based Burgers Stack Up? We Taste-Tested Them I agree that Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat rank highest, though I’ve also been a long-time fan of Field Roast. But I always find it odd when taste tests include …
Here is an excellent opportunity presented by the University of Utah Press: The Wallace Stegner Prize will be awarded to the best monograph submitted to the Press in the broad field of environmental humanities. To compete for this award, manuscripts must emphasize interdisciplinary investigations of the natural and human environments and their fundamental interconnectedness, research …
When you hear the word “garden” do you picture something like this: Or do you picture something more like this: The fact that these are both “gardens” illustrates just how loaded the word has become over the years. And the fact a garden can be so many things made me curious as to how we …
Here’s a unique opportunity for writers of essays, fiction, poetry and, well, pretty much anything that focuses on water. Deadline is December 1st. Michigan Quarterly Review (MQR) is seeking submissions for Not One Without: A Special Issue on Water. The edition seeks to explore urgent, complex, and revelatory writing on water from around the world. …
What in the world could be inhumane about gardening? Plenty, it turns out, thanks to this beautifully produced and incredibly important book by Nancy Lawson: The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife. The Humane Gardener makes a persuasive case for rethinking conventional knowledge about what a garden or yard should look like and …
The India-based organization BeAnimal is sponsoring a writing contest with a grand prize of a trip to the Valley of Flowers National Park in India. There is no entry fee. And though they ask you to follow via Instagram and Facebook, they tell me it’s not mandatory. Click here to learn more
Funny how a word can change on you. When I moved to Oregon nearly a decade ago, I first heard about the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, about the Steens mountain range, and the diversity of bird species that migrate through this region. Back then, Malheur meant wilderness. But in 2016, after group of armed men …
