Writing the Watershed: Workshop with Elizabeth Herron

Whether you consider yourself a writer or simply enjoy putting words down in a journal or naturalist’s notebook, if you are interested in a deeper connection to our Sonoma County landscape, this writing workshop is open to you. We will start with a centering exercise and end with a closing circle. In between, Elizabeth will talk about the craft of writing, there will be writing exercises, time outside in the paradise of the Laguna in spring, and time to share our writing with each other. Participants will strengthen their engagement with the watershed and practice grounding their writing in the details of the natural world. Whether you write prose or poetry, this workshop will give you a more intimate experience of the Laguna de Santa Rosa and an opportunity to improve your writing skills.

Elizabeth Carothers Herron spent her childhood rambling woods, fields and shorelines, and grew up loving the outdoors. When the Dunsmuir Spill was reported in 1991, she felt called to witness the disaster. (“It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez or the Cuyahoga River, it was our river, right here.”) She walked the banks of the Sacramento River where 19,000 gallons of metam sodium had seared the riparian corridor and killed everything in the water from Cantara Loop to Lake Shasta. For the next ten years, her writing centered almost entirely on ecological subjects; and she developed and taught, Ecological Identity, the first Arts & Humanities GE course in ecology at SSU. Elizabeth is the author of four poetry chapbooks, a book of short fiction, and articles on art and ecology. Her poems appear most recently in over a dozen literary magazines, including Arroyo, West Marin Review, Lindenwood, Free State Review and Reflections. Her prose has been published in Ions, Orion, Parabola, Jung Journal and currently Center for Humans & Nature’s “Questions for a Resilient Future”. She lives on the hem of the Atascadero in the Russian River watershed.

For more information, visit www.lagunafoundation.org 

Or contact Anita Smith, Public Education Manager, Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation

(707) 527-9277 x 110, anita@lagunafoundation.org