Sustaining the Writing Life: A Nitty-Gritty Primer with J. Drew Lanham and Krissy Kludt

This is a live, participatory lab and it will not be recorded. A meeting link will be emailed a few days prior to the lab. Cancellations must be made 48 hours prior to the lab and will be charged a $10 cancellation fee. Partial scholarships may be available; contact us to apply.

Poet Krissy Kludt is the founder and Executive Director of Writing the Wild. She guides retreats and workshops on writing, creativity, and nature connection. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, The Nature of Our Times, Humana Obscura; The Wildness We Tend; Tremblings; and Stories from the Trail (Wayfarer Books 2024). She is most at home in the hills; after two decades in California, she and her family now reside in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.

J. Drew Lanham , PhD, is a creator; a poet, a writer, a curator and a libbretist. He is a naturalist/bird-adorer/hunter/conservationist/farmer who blends wild ecology into the social context of human being, past present and future. Drew is also a Certified Wildlife Biologist and a Distinguished Alumni Professor of cultural and conservation ornithology at Clemson University. He is the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, SC and the author of Sparrow Envy - Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts (Hub City 2021) and the award-winning, The Home Place - Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions 2016). Drew's academic and artist work centers on ethnic perspectives of wildness and conservation. Drew's creative work and opinion appears abundantly online and in print in venues such as Orion, Emergence, Vanity Fair, Oxford American, High Country News, Bitter Southerner, Cutthroat, Terrain, Places Journal, Literary Hub, Newsweek, Slate, NPR, Story Corps, Audubon, Sierra Magazine, Mud Review, The New York Times, American Bird Conservancy, Leopold Outlook , Flycatcher Journal, Patagonia "This is Love", "Threshold" , and "On Being" podcasts. His online presence on YouTube as well as social media is extensive. Drew has been featured in Garden and Gun Magazine and Clemson World. He teaches writing workshops in creative non-fiction for Bread Loaf Environmental Writer's Conference, Northwoods Writer's Conference, Elk River Writer's Conference and Orion. He is an editor for Cutthroat Journal, a contributing editor for Orion Magazine and on the editorial board of Terrain Magazine. He is Co-Director of the online workshop "Writing the Wild," and his work is reposited in the Sowell Family Archives at Texas Tech University. Drew is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow living on a 46-acre farm in the Dark Corner of South Carolina, where he claims a mission of "Cultivating words and wildness.” His most recent work, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (Hub City 2024), is a lyrical treatment on deep ornithology, redefining wildness, and pushing "good trouble" past narrowed minds while celebrating his intensely southern rural Blackness. Drew's favorite birds are the wild ones with feathers.