Writing the Wild is an 8-month interactive writing journey guided by Krissy Kludt and J. Drew Lanham. Blending virtual gatherings and tactile-sensory learning packages sent by mail, the program offers writers a multidimensional experience to deepen creative intimacy with their human and more-than-human communities in response to the urgencies of our time.
Free Event
Thursday, May 29, 6-7:30pm CT, Live online
What can the vital forces of earth, air, water, and fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world? This central question of the Elementals book series will be our focus at this free, virtual gathering.
J. Drew Lanham and Krissy Kludt—co-directors of Writing the Wild—will sit down with series editor Gavin Van Horn and contributors Elizabeth Bradfield, Felicia Zamora, Geffrey Davis, Heather Swan, and Nicholas Triolo to talk about the importance and complexity of writing with the elements. How can our writing benefit from deeply immersing ourselves in the elemental forces? How might we honor these forces on the page? How are we to live well in this elemental world?
Through readings, writing prompts, and conversation, we’ll explore elementals as sources of strength, solace, and inspiration. We’ll examine ways of living in mutual relationship with these animating forces. Each participant will come away with seeds and sparks for their own earthy, fiery, airy, liquid writing.
Join Writing the Wild
Explore wildness (around and within you) through words.
Deepen your intimacy with the more-than-human world.
Release your creativity for the sake of mutual flourishing.
Enrollment opens May 27, 2025. Join our email list for a chance to apply early and to learn more!
We live in an age of crisis and possibility. Mass extinction. Habitat loss. Climate disruption. Threats to the living, breathing planet are coming from all sides along with unprecedented human displacement, political precarity, and injustice.
Such times call for new stories. They demand new narratives, creative leaps of truth and beauty that confront violation, deepen our love, and move us toward action and healing.
How might we sharpen our focus and creative energies to converge and create anew during these unraveling times? What if we saw our creative process as essential to holding our world together? What if our expression felt like a radical homecoming—to Earth, to our bioregion, to ourselves?
Writing the World offers an innovative landscape for creative adventuring, one that pulls together a diverse cohort, world-class instructors, and inventive exercises to meld art and science, personal and planetary. In gathering, we turn to the Earth as our teacher as we conduct workshops, host dialogues, pursue better questions, and explore seasonal wisdom together. Our packages offer interdisciplinary, embodied practices interwoven with generative writing for self-guided learning and creative risk-taking within our mutually–encouraging community.
The new stories we need begin with deep listening: with curiosity, compassion, attentiveness, and love. Together, we will expand our circumference of care. Nothing could be more urgent. Join us?
The Writing the Wild Cohort includes:
Mailed packages, including books, prompts, and supplies for:
writing (poetry, creative nonfiction, and a touch of fiction)
nature immersion (coming to know your own landscape)
creative cross training (simple artistic practices to sharpen our prisms of vision)
rest and play (essential to the creative life)
A biodiverse Zoom ecosystem: craft workshops with special guests and teachers, conversations with established writers and artists, listening sessions, seasonal contemplative workshops, and more
Ongoing growth: opportunities for gathering resources, establishing habits, and cultivating relationships that will extend far beyond this 8-month container
Enrollment for the 2025-2026 cohort opens on May 27, 2025. Sign up for email updates for an opportunity to apply early.
Past Participants Say:
“Krissy and Drew break through the barriers of screen through multi-sensory exploration and opportunities sent, sometimes by mail, always through loving intention and particular thought to seasonal details. What they do, how they do it—are actions procured by commitment and are nurturing beyond imagination.”
“Thank you for being such a wonderful teacher and gentle nurturer of my soul. Through your prompts and emails, you have been the one who’s walked quietly into the woods, and waited for more of me to emerge.”
“Being a member of the Writing the Wild cohort has helped to heal and reawaken my intuitive creator. I loved being surrounded by shared values of: nature, creativity, seasonality, curiosity, and care.”
“The experience was one of reflection and growth, of meeting and sharing with others who walk the path of creativity and grow from sharing their insights and creations. I loved every aspect. It guided and supported me while leaving me free to wander and wonder at my own pace on my own path.”
