Wide Open Studios offers a workshop at the confluence of land and word in the age of migration. We welcome artists and writers from any creative background. Readings and writing prompts will invite us to engage with the following questions: How do words and language help us form a sense of place? When people are displaced, or our homes forever altered, what is the process for forging a new sense of place? The ideas of migration and restoration will frame our journey through moments of both travel and stillness.
Our trip begins with four days of backpacking in Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains, where wildfire is the dominant non-human force reshaping the landscape. Fire suppression and climate change have contributed to the intensity of recent fire seasons, and salvage logging operations threaten the recovery of these forests, where fragile serpentine soil supports wildly diverse biotic systems. We’ll learn to notice and interpret the history of fire and human intervention as told by the land we walk through, alongside clean wild rivers and amidst groves of old growth conifers. The second part of our trip will take place at a meadow restoration project near Ashland, where community naturalists are contributing to the rewilding of a heavily-grazed wetland area. Narratives of displacement and resettlement, specifically from the lower Klamath and Siskiyous region, will add context to our observations of nature’s patterns. Participants will draw on their own backgrounds and words, in combination with our shared experience, to craft new writing during the trip. This trip includes moderately-challenging backpacking as well as base-camping with day hike opportunities. The terrain is rugged and remote, but this trip is appropriate for anyone in good physical condition, even and especially first-time backpackers.
Participants: Patricia Boddy, Mack Carlisle, Lindsay Costello, Carlina Duan, Mikai Lewis, Sammy Sass, Nathan Storey Freeman, Chesley Walsh, Ana Anu Wyssman.
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