More than Human: Nature Writing without Cliché with Manjula Martin

More than Human: Nature Writing without Cliché is a 6-week long workshop with author Manjula Martin. The class will take place on Zoom on Tuesdays from April 14 to May 19, 2026 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. PST. The course will include discussions of craft, selected readings, and participants' works in progress. All participants will receive written feedback on an essay, book chapter, or outline/proposal from the instructor.

Whether meditating on your relationship with your pandemic garden or examining the relationship between the climate crisis and colonialism, creative nonfiction writers in the current era face unique challenges. As humans and our planet face rapid change, how can we tell stories about it without resorting to clichéd language or outmoded perspectives? In this workshop we’ll look at—and create—new techniques for writing about the more-than-human world. We’ll read and write with an eye toward challenging the “lone, enraptured male” gaze; casting landscapes as actors, not scenery; subverting narrative binaries like “hope vs doom”; and how to deploy structure to disrupt linear time. We'll also learn to reshape language, vocabulary, and metaphor by looking to the elements—earth, air, water, fire, spirit—as guides and writing partners.

Each week we’ll discuss a craft element based on a brief reading assignment, then critique and respond to student works-in-progress. Each participant will be invited to submit a piece of writing of roughly 3,000 words (or, if preferred, an outline of a long-form project) for in-class workshop and written feedback from the instructor. This class is primarily for writers of creative nonfiction, but fiction writers who wish to focus on writing environment and place are welcome.

Manjula Martin is the bestselling author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Northern California Book Award. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, winner of the American Horticultural Society Book Award. Martin edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. She is senior editor of ZYZZYVA and was previously managing editor of Zoetrope: All-Story. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Orion, Alta, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.