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鈥淲herever you are and wherever you live, what鈥檚 most important in your life in some ways connects to questions of landscape and weather and air, to relation of inner and outer worlds, imagination and fact.鈥� 鈥� Gary Snyder
鈥淲herever you are and wherever you live, what鈥檚 most important in your life in some ways connects to questions of landscape and weather and air, to relation of inner and outer worlds, imagination and fact.鈥�
A century ago, famed poet Robinson Jeffers encouraged an earlier era of ecological awareness in his emphasis on 鈥渢he fate going on outside our fate.鈥� That perceived gap between human existence and other species has narrowed. In our era, climate change and mass extinction impinge upon Jeffers鈥檚 soft duality: nothing is 鈥渙utside鈥�; rather, we share our fate with all life-forms.
Since Jeffers鈥檚 time, our intimacy with the environment has at once waxed and waned: we understand the intricacies of ecology better than ever, yet many of us spend less quality time outdoors. Though our world today 鈥渟eems increasingly focused on the needs of humans,鈥� as poet Melissa Kwasny said recently as visiting writer to the 91传媒 MFA program, 鈥渢he struggle to widen the world to one where we exist in relation to other forms of life seems crucial.鈥�
Formerly known as the Wilderness, Ecology, and Community concentration, 91传媒 MFA’s special track in environmental writing was recently renamed Landscape, Ecology, and Community (the LEC) to broaden this important conversation and more clearly include both natural and built environments in Eastern Oregon and beyond. We acknowledge and celebrate that we live in a mosaic landscape that is urban, suburban, rural, “conserved,” “wild,” and everything in between. Students and faculty in the Landscape, Ecology, and Community concentration are drawn to these diverse geographies and to the manifold lifeforms of the Pacific Northwest. At the same time, we are cautioned by the legacy of extraction and marginalization within the region鈥檚 history.
The LEC concentration empowers students to explore these many environments and histories, while connecting students to the Pacific Northwest鈥檚 rich tradition of writers and thinkers with a deep and abiding attachment to the land鈥擶illiam O. Douglas, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, William Kittredge, Annick Smith, James Welch, Norman Maclean, Kim Barnes, Gloria Bird, Barry Lopez, Kathleen Dean Moore, Duane Niatum, Annie Dillard, Robert Michael Pyle, Ana Maria Spagna, John Daniel, Elizabeth Woody, and Theodore Roethke, to name only a few who are familiar to us today. Via the concentration, students join their voices to this long and ongoing conversation with the landscape and its many peoples and organisms.
Situated among some of Oregon鈥檚 most remote, undeveloped areas, 91传媒 lies in the rural, agricultural Grande Ronde Valley, which is threaded through with I-84, an important corridor for commerce. It is surrounded by the Wallowa, Elkhorn, and Blue Mountain ranges, and the Eagle Cap, Hells Canyon, North Fork Umatilla, North Fork John Day, Monument Rock, Strawberry Mountain, and Wenaha-Tucannon Wildernesses all are located nearby. Given this great variety of working and wild landscapes–and in partnership with –we use these places as a classroom and as case studies during our two-week summer residency. Students participating in the Landscape, Ecology, and Community concentration learn within a diverse and challenging curriculum that allows them to study with visiting writers as well as MFA faculty in courses that foreground writing and craft, as well as topics of both historical and contemporary interest in the field of ecological writing broadly construed.
In addition to a foundational course in “The Roots of Environmental Writing/The New Environmental Writing,” students take at least five courses from a rotating assortment of LEC special topics and residency craft classes. Recent and upcoming topics include “Gender, Sexuality, and Environment,” “Films about Place,” “Speculative Fiction of the (Post-)Anthropocene,” “Concepts of Home,” “Queer Ecologies,” “Northwest Place-based Literature,” “Agrarian Literature/Writing about Water,” “Animal Experiments,” and more. Typically these courses are multi-genre. Course topics are representative, evolving, and not all will be taught in a two-year period. Each year, some of Fishtrap workshops also have an environmental or place-based theme that supplement the LEC concentration.