DECOLONIZING SENSES: CO-CREATING WORLDS AND JOY WITH MORE-THAN-HUMANS — April 9, 2022
DECOLONIZING SENSES: CO-CREATING WORLDS AND JOY WITH MORE-THAN-HUMANS — April 9, 2022
(ONLINE)
SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 2022, 10:00AM - 1:00PM PACIFIC TIME
VIA ZOOM
Registration closes at 9:00am the morning of the class. Be sure and reserve your spot!
INSTRUCTOR:
RASHEENA FOUNTAIN
Your white wings flutter warm hellos and staccato reggae music strums.
Your white wings flutter warm hellos and staccato reggae music strums.
And when your white wings flutter warm goodbyes, you leave cabbage worm reflections of what I’ve become
— From Cabbage Worm Blues by Rasheena Fountain
My environmental memory starts in Grandma’s Garden. Grandma’s garden was a small patch of dirt in her backyard on Chicago’s westside. Here the birds sang, called, and visited: Northern Cardinals, Blue Jays, American Robins, and American Crows. Butterflies, moths and bees flew in celebration of the sustenance they could find in the mostly concrete neighborhood. Gardening was in Grandma’s nature, and her garden was a way for her to connect to her environment. As a writer, I have found inspiration in these memories, and use my writing to create space for nature connections. As I create these spaces and engage with other beings, I am looking for ways to rethink my relationship to nature.
In 2019, I created Decolonizing Senses, a poem and audio experience that encourages people to look to more-than-humans to unlearn norms like ownership and extraction. In this audio experience, I encourage a writing practice that builds new relationality and deep senses-driven observation when engaging in nature. This practice helped me create Cabbage Worm Blues, a work that resituates my relationship to insects in my patio garden during the 2020 quarantine. In 2020, I also participated in a Women and Whales poetry cohort, where we considered the plight of endangered whales with our plight as women of color and performed to the public.
Decolonizing senses continues to aid my practice, and I would like to offer a reflection about Decolonizing Senses, as well as my participation in the poetry cohort.
In this course you will:
• Explore how humans can co-create worlds and joy with more- than-humans through writing, observation, and invitation
• Get in touch with what you/we love about the more-than-human world, and find ways to go even deeper in relating and noticing
• Find your ways to express the love, wonder, worries you experience
• Learn ways to shape your work
In this course we will:
• Learn writing and revision strategies
• Develop strategies for engaging community (human and more-than-human) and share our experiences
• Gain writing practice tips (as well as ways to generate writing)
• Find inspiration for writing in other art forms
• Share our work and discuss ways to further build community with other writers
• Learn from writers and thinkers engaging intentionally with more-than-human relationships in their work
The course is open to writers at all stages, and from all backgrounds, and people who do not consider themselves writers. Participants from all backgrounds are welcome. In the first half of the course, we will reflect on writing practice and nature observation through discussions. The second half of the course is geared to catapult a writing practice that may extend beyond the course.
What to bring: Please be prepared to recall a meaningful encounter you have had with a more-than-human (animal, flower, body of water, garden, and so on). We will use these encounters in our writing and observation discussions.
TUITION: $30 - $50 SLIDING SCALE (plus processing fees)
BIPOC SCHOLARSHIP AVAILABLE
SUPPORT NATURE CONNECTION: Please consider making an additional donation to help TreeSong, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Anything helps and we thank you in advance!
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has." — Margaret Mead
Processing fees are only applied to tuition amounts, never to donations.
Instructor bio:
Rasheena Fountain is a poet and essayist whose work focuses on Black environmental memory. She is originally from Chicago but now lives in Seattle. She has been published in Hobart Pulp, Penumbra Online, Mountaineer Magazine, The Roadrunner Review, ZORA, HuffPost, Jelly Bucket and more. She has partnered with environmental organizations like the National Resource Defense Council to highlight Black stories through writing profiles about Black environmental professionals; and has worked as a digital communications manager for the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars program alumni network where she supported young environmental professionals of color as they acclimated to the environmental field. She is a former Walker Communications Fellow with the National Audubon Society. In 2018, Fountain started an online project, Climate Conscious Collabs, in response to the need for more Black environmental relationships in the media. This work has engaged a “nontraditional” environmental audience, as well as mainstream organizations like the North American Congress for Conservation Biology, which used her work during their annual conference in 2020. She has a B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in Urban Environmental Education from Antioch University Seattle, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle. She is currently an MA/PhD student in English.
Awards: National Audubon Society Walker Communications Editorial Fellow, 2017; Outstanding Civil Service Staff Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016; Illinois Community College Journalism Award, 2002; The Richard J. Dunn First-Year Teaching Award, 2020.
Learn more about Rasheena here.