Teaching Environmental Writing: Ecocritical Pedagogy and Poetics (Environmental Cultures)

Environmental writing is an increasingly popular literary genre, and a multifaceted genre at that. Recently dominated by works of ‘new nature writing’, environmental writing includes works of poetry and fiction about the world around us. In the last two decades, universities have begun to offer environmental writing modules and courses with the intention of teaching students skills in the field of writing inspired by the natural world. This book asks how students are being guided into writing about environments. Informed by independently conducted interviews with educators, and a review of existing pedagogical guides, it explores recurring instructions given to students for writing about the environment and compares these pedagogical approaches to the current theory and practice of ecocriticism by scholars such as Ursula Heise and Timothy Morton. Proposing a set of original pedagogical exercises influenced by ecocriticism, the book draws on a number of self-reflexive, environmentally-conscious poets, including Juliana Spahr, Jorie Graham and Les Murray, as creative and stimulating models for teachers and students.

Isabel Galleymore is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, UK. She publishes on contemporary ecopoetry. Her first collection of poems is Significant Other (2019).

Richard Kerridge is a nature writer and ecocritic who leads the MA in Creative Writing and co-ordinates research and postgraduate studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, UK. His works include: Cold Blood: Adventures with Reptiles and Amphibians (2014), J. H. Prynne's place-based poem-sequence The Oval Window, in collaboration with the late N. H. Reeve (2018), Writing the Enviornment (1998) and his other nature writing has been broadcast and published in BBC Wildlife, Poetry Review and Granta. He was awarded the 2012 Roger Deakin Prize by the Society of Authors, and has twice received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing. He was founding Chair of ASLE-UKI and has been an elected member of the ASLE Executive Council. With Greg Garrard he is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic series 'Environmental Cultures' – the first series of monographs in the Environmental Humanities to be published in Britain and he is a member of the steering committee of New Networks for Nature.

Greg Garrard is Associate Professor of Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of the bestselling book Ecocriticism (2nd edition, 2011) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014).