Wednesday, July 29th, 2026, 5:30PM - 7:30PM
Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. General registration for Summer Classes & Workshops will open on Tuesday, May 12th at 10:00AM.
From roots to trunks, leaves to cones, trees uphold living libraries across the Earth. How do you read and write with trees? Forests communicate underground, grow canopies that shelter biodiverse species, and oxygenate the atmosphere that we breathe. In this writing workshop, we reimagine the presence of wood in our words—poetry, nonfiction, fiction, between & beyond—rooting and branching between lines and sentences, paragraphs and poetics of place, reconnecting heartwood with our own hearts. The human imagination seeks relational structures, from family trees to linguistic and evolutionary systems, along with practices like shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. Any tree—a maple or palo verde, juniper or cedar, redwood to ironwood to pine—can be a teacher to root us in place. As forest fires, bark beetles, and climate changes threaten these living libraries, let’s try to read the forest AND the trees.
This generative workshop continues Gretchen’s series of eco-writing workshops at the Poetry Center and elsewhere around “Relational Ecologies: Writing with a More-than-Human World.” For this workshop, we are fortunate to be gathering in Tucson, associated with the birthplace of dendrochronology: the dating and study of tree rings.