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“Wherever you are and wherever you live, what’s 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.” — Gary Snyder
“Wherever you are and wherever you live, what’s 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.”
A century ago, famed poet Robinson Jeffers encouraged an earlier era of ecological awareness in his emphasis on “the fate going on outside our fate.” That perceived gap between human existence and other species has narrowed. In our era, climate change and mass extinction impinge upon Jeffers’s soft duality: nothing is “outside”; rather, we share our fate with all life-forms.
Since Jeffers’s 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 “seems increasingly focused on the needs of humans,” as poet Melissa Kwasny said recently as visiting writer to the EOU MFA program, “the struggle to widen the world to one where we exist in relation to other forms of life seems crucial.”
Formerly known as the Wilderness, Ecology, and Community concentration, EOU 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’s history.
The LEC concentration empowers students to explore these many environments and histories, while connecting students to the Pacific Northwest’s rich tradition of writers and thinkers with a deep and abiding attachment to the land—William 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’s most remote, undeveloped areas, Eastern Oregon University 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 Fishtrap: Writing and the West–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.
Nick Neely MFA Co-director Phone: 541-962-3633 E-mail: nneely@eou.edu
Heather McConnell Administrative Program Assistant College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Phone: 541-962-3644 E-mail: hlmcconnell@eou.edu
Eastern Oregon University La Grande, OR 97850-2899