Nature's Narrative Writing
Through these creative writing workshops, participants are asked to consider how ‘nature’ produces its own narratives, and how imaginative and artistic expression can respond to and raise greater attention to such stories – while acknowledging what is at stake in defining ‘nature’ at a time of increasing environmental degradation. We will explore how writing can rise up to the challenges and inspirations of listening and responding to nature’s many narratives. (And, yes, sometimes this will mean going outside of conventional literary spaces and into the field!)
Each workshop features an artist, writer, or poet working with environmental topics, processes, and objectives in conversation with a university researcher in environmental humanities. These speakers will share some of their work, discuss their practice, and offer participants exploratory writing exercises. After a brief writing session, participants will get the opportunity to share and discuss their own work. Participants also will have the opportunity to share selected work emerging from these sessions at a public presentation during ILFU’s Exploring Stories festival in the fall.
Workshops are held monthly from March to June on Friday afternoons (15-17:00). Participants can sign up for the full series of four workshops (for €75) or for individual sessions (€20 each). UU students can receive a discount code to attend the workshops for free by registrering with the workshop organizers.
For more information or the discount code, please contact the workshop organizers: Tom van Bunnik (t.vanbunnik@uu.nl) and Mia You (m.m.you@uu.nl)
Confirmed Workshops
On Making Stories of Wounds and Wonder | 14 March 15:00-17:00
In her experimental children’s book, Stories of Wounds and Wonder, Nuraini Juliastuti explores storytelling and story-making as an intergenerational transmission tool to talk about postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion across generations. The book centres on the perspectives of local animals as archives, bearing the marks of ecological detriments. In this workshop, Nuraini Juliastuti, alongside Josephine Chambers (Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, Utrecht University) will guide participants to explore the potential of drawing and children’s literature in transmitting multispecies companionship of survival, solidarity, and justice.
Nuraini Juliastuti is a translocal practising researcher and writer who focusses on art organisations, activism, illegality, alternative cultural production and unofficial, everyday practices of vernacular archiving. Juliastuti co-founded Kunci Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia; she also develops Domestic Notes, a publication-based project that uses domestic and migrant spaces as sites to discuss everyday politics, organisation of makeshift support systems, and alternative cultural production. With her family, she runs a small press, Reading Sideways Press, to publish works and translations on arts, sports, and literature.
Josephine (Josie) Chambers is Assistant Professor in the Urban Futures Studio at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development. Her research examines how critical and artistic approaches can challenge notions of ‘inevitable’ unjust futures and enable radical imagination and transformative politics. Through her blog series Utopian Pulses she shares creative approaches for collectively imagining the world otherwise.
Birdwatching & Birdwriting | 11 April 2025 15:00-17:00
In this workshop, Nikki Dekker and Kári Driscoll will discuss human-animal relations and their representation in literature, while guiding us on a birdwatching tour through Utrecht.
Nikki Dekker is an author and radio producer. Her debut novel diepdiepblauw (2022) was awarded with the CCS Crone Stipendium and nominated for the Bronzen Uil and De Boon. Before this, she published essays and poetry in her chapbook een voorwerp dat nog leeft (2018). She produced radio documentaries for NTR and VPRO and wrote the scenario for the podcast series De Brandstapel. She writes columns for Vroege Vogels and is on the editorial board of the literary journal Tirade. In September 2024, her second book, Graafdier, was published, a journey through the earth’s crust and through time.
Kári Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. He holds a PhD in German from Columbia University. His research focuses on human-animal relations in literature and culture. He is interested in the poetics of animality (zoopoetics), the zoo as a space of encounter and imagination, and imagining more-than-human communities in the age of the Anthropocene. Since 2021, he has been the editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary, open-access journal Humanimalia. In addition to his scholarly activities, he is also an award-winning translator.
Writing Life and Afterlife | 16 May 2025, 15:00-17:00
In this workshop, Lucy Mercer and Layal Ftouni will consider how ideas of life, death and afterlife are shaped by politics and economics and seen as 'natural'. What counternarratives do we find in resistance, nonhuman and cultural ecologies and material processes? Through conversation, group discussion and writing exercises, participants will produce some experimental writing reflecting on these questions.
Lucy Mercer’s first poetry collection, Emblem (Prototype, 2022) was a Poetry Society Book Choice. In 2024, she was awarded the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Essay Prize for Afterlife, a nonfiction essay about wax and mortality that is forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions. With Livia Franchini she founded and edits the journal Too Little / Too Hard. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter for the RENEW project and organized the “Literature x Ecology” reading series.
Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at the Graduate Gender Programme. Her teaching is transdisciplinary, crossing fields of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, political theory, visual studies and critical race studies. Layal is currently working on a new research project (2021-2025) funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) tentatively entitled Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival. The research explores the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death (both human and environmental) in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Syria and Palestine.
Ecopoetics in the Anthropocene | 13 June 2025 15:00-17:00
In this workshop, Juliana Spahr and Tom van Bunnik will consider the practice and theory of ecopoetics. What is the role of poetry in the Anthropocene and how does poetry respond to the environmental crisis and? What role does poetic form play in giving shape to and being shaped by the environment? How does ecopoetics reinvent and reimagine poetic genres and conventions to face the climate crisis? Through discussion and writing exercises, participants will experiment with poetic structure and write their own ecopoetry.
Juliana Spahr is a poet and scholar. Her poetry collections include Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (2001), This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (2005), and Well Then There Now (2011). Her most recent book, That Winter the Wolf Came (2015), concerns global struggle, especially those located at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. She holds a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo and her books of criticism and theory include Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001) and Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (2018). Spahr received the 2009 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is currently teaching an associate professor of English at Mills College at Northeastern University.
Tom van Bunnik is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University and part of the ERC-funded project “Ecologies of Violence: Crime Against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination”. His research focuses on the ways in which environmental degradation is being framed and remembered as violence in contemporary eco-poetry and ecopoetics. He holds an MA in Comparative Literary Studies with a thesis on the commons, which explores how poetic form gives shape to and is shaped by the enduring promise of the commons to resist capitalist privatization and expropriation.