“This workshop helped me see an appreciation of nature. Especially the focus on Indigenous writers and peoples accessibility and inaccessibility to nature. Also the prompts and time given during each meeting gave us an opportunity to write and helped prepare all we need to write during the time we meet.”

***

“I joined the workshop mainly because I did not feel any particular connection with nature. What I learned in the workshop is that I don’t need to focus on writing about nature to write about nature! I wrote about my family and my heritage and somehow nature turned out to be the center of my writing.”

***

“I wrote a lot! I was not expecting to write and be inspired to write!”

***

“The thing I liked most was the reading. I got familiar with many BIPOC writers and poets. We discussed their work together. The instructor chose a lot of inspiring pieces for us to read. I was surprised by how BIPOC writers engage with nature through their identities.”

***

“What stayed with me and resonated alot was a poem by Audre Lorde about cockroaches. In this poem Lorde talks about the resilience of roaches. One ugly aspect of nature was interpreted in a positive way”

***

“I was able to really understand the ways that I am biased on my internalized colonization, and the ways I can experiment with decolonizing my perspectives and beliefs. For example, thinking about ways that we can decolonize time was very powerful for me because as a graduate student the ways in which we are taught to view time can be really constraining and oppressive.”

***

“Through the readings and prompts that we covered I was able to understand how others have been able to connect with the nonhuman living beings that also experience what we experience. I continue to do readings such as “Braiding Sweetgrass” to further understand how to honor indigenous people and knowledge because as a researcher and as a writer this is very valuable knowledge that I feel the need to reconnect with.”