a four week program running
6.30 – 8.30pm on Mondays
2, 9, 16 and 23 November
at 8a Tivey Street, Newstead
this is a wheelchair accessible venue
All welcome
$180, $160 for Newstead Arts Hub members
Your booking covers all four sessions
Become a member
New Nature Writing
Participants will be supported in their writing practice and their understandings about New Nature Writing in the context of climate change. Your thinking about your relationship with the natural world will be extended as you write.
You will aim to produce a piece of writing (such as creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry, memoir, travel writing) of approximately 1,000 words, or multiple shorter pieces as suited. The program aims to strengthen your writing voice. Each participant is encouraged to develop a regular writing practice throughout the program.
Each week the two-hour workshop will include three main activities:
1. Discussing topics/themes within the broad arena of New Nature Writing, including:
- History and styles of Nature Writing – Writing in the Anthropocene, responding to Climate Change,
- Writing on/about/with Indigenous Country
- Observations, senses and emotions in Nature Writing
- Writing WITH Non-human Animals, Forests, Water, Atmospheres etc
- Extinctions, Hauntings and Eco-Ghosts in New Nature Writing. Solastalgia and Shifting Baseline Syndrome.
- Ecofeminism and Queer Ecologies
- Toxicity and Rubbish: storying dumped matter: challenging cultural myths.
- Walking, writing emersion in place.
2. Discussing current nature writing readings as distributed by the facilitator, by email each week.
3. Writing exercises on the weekly theme – writing prompts and activities will develop your repertoire of creative writing.
The Spring 2026 four-week program is suitable for writers with any range of experience. It is suitable for those who have completed the New Nature Writing workshops in 2025, as the 2026 program revises key themes and covers new topics.
Deborah Wardle has fiction and non-fiction stories published in peer-reviewed articles in Australian and international journals including Meninscus, Mosaic, Fusion. Animal Studies Journal and Meanjin.
Her book, Subterranean Imaginaries and Groundwater Narratives (Routledge, 2024) is a hybrid scholarly/creative work based on her PhD thesis. Deborah’s story ‘Groundwater’ appears in Ground: Best Australian Nature Writing (2024).
Deborah is an experienced teacher of Creative Writing and Literature at RMIT & University of Melbourne, specialising in teaching the art of writing stories that reflect human and non-human responses to global warming.