The EOU New Nature Writing Con returns for another year

The EOU New Nature Writing Con returns for another year

LA GRANDE, Ore. – The EOU MFA Program in Creative Writing and the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences are excited to announce the second EOU New Nature Writing Con, which will take place July 18-19, Friday and Saturday, with additional “pre-con” events and classes earlier in the week.

As part of the MFA program’s concentration in Landscape, Ecology, and Community, the conference seeks to highlight authors and recent books that are pushing the boundaries of eco-writing, broadly construed, especially in the Northwest. The conference consists of two days of readings, conversations, and classes that bring together readers, students, MFA faculty, and award-winning visiting writers. All readings and conversations are free and open to the public. The conference’s four classes are by registration for $75.00 total, as are four “pre-con” classes.

The conference kicks off Friday, July 18, at 7:30 p.m. at hq (112 Depot Street) with Emma Pattee, a climate journalist whose debut novel, Tilt, is set in the aftermath of a major earthquake in Portland and takes place over the course of a single day as it follows “one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future.” The book was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection, and NPR calls it “utterly gripping.” Pattee will be followed at hq by the folk rock artist Arthur Buezo.

A full day of programming on Saturday, July 19, in EOU’s Zabel Hall begins at 10 a.m. with Shannon Cram and her nonfiction book Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility, a hybrid work of history, memoir, and ethnography about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation that Kirkus Reviews calls “a powerfully researched and important look at the ravages of nuclear waste remediation.” It was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and the winner of several book awards in anthropology and social sciences.

At 1 p.m., Jeannine Hall Gailey presents her latest poetry collection Flare, Corona, also a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. As the publisher describes it, “Against a constellation of solar weather events and an evolving pandemic … Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the ways that we prevail and persevere through health adversities while facing an uncertain future.”

The conference concludes Saturday at 3 p.m. with Charlie J. Stephens and their book A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, winner of the Leslie Feinberg Award for Gender-Variant and Trans Literature and a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. “This novel feels like breathing in the lushness of the forest, where all our past memories, both difficult and joyful, greet us as animals in the night,” Kali Fajardo-Anstine said.

Each of these authors will also offer a one-hour class for registered participants. A light luncheon on Saturday is included as part of registration. Registration info and a full schedule, including additional “pre-con” events and classes, can be found via the conference website. For more information, please contact EOU MFA director Nick Neely at nneely@eou.edu.