Environmental Writing Fellowship and Residency
Location: The Cabin at Shotpouch Creek
For the Environmental Writing Fellowship and Residency program, the Spring Creek Project partners with a regional organization or nonprofit to support a writer committed to crafting compelling stories about a critical issue or theme. Over the course of a year, the Spring Creek Project and the partner organization develop a collaborative, supportive relationship with the fellow as they explore, research and work toward completing the writing project.
Fellows receive an honorarium, access to resources and experts, assistance in planning a public event and two to four weeks in residence at Shotpouch Cabin in the Oregon Coast Range. The cabin, located within a nature reserve, offers a profound experience of concentrated solitude and simple living that is conducive to curiosity, reflection and sustained focus.
The 2023-2024 Environmental Writing Fellowship and Residency is underway in partnership with the conservation nonprofit Oregon Wild, and the selected writer is developing a portfolio of work on this year’s thematic focus, Oregon’s Climate Forests. In its inaugural year, the fellowship was awarded to Jenna Butler.
If your organization is interested in partnering with us to support a writer who can amplify stories central to your mission, fill out this interest form or contact us.
We will announce our partner organization, theme, and eligibility for the 2024-2025 Environmental Writing Fellowship and Residency on this page, with a link to apply, in January 2024.
Current Resident
Jenna Butler (she/her) is an award-winning BIPOC writer, teacher, and editor. She is the author of six books of poetry and essays about the land, particularly the northern boreal forest of Treaty 6 territory in Alberta, Canada, where she lives and farms off the grid. Her latest books include "A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail," winner of the Canadian Authors' Association Exporting Alberta Award, and "Revery: A Year of Bees," a finalist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction and longlisted title for CBC Canada Reads 2023. Jenna's land-based research has taken her around the globe, from Ireland's Ring of Kerry to Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean aboard an ice-class sailing ship, chronicling our stories of the places we call home.
During her year-long fellowship, Jenna's writing project will seek to draw together diverse communities living and working in Oregon's climate forests and link them with communities living and working in Alberta's boreal forests, providing opportunities for the people from each of these incredible ecosystems to share their stories of place and of the climate crisis. Oregon's climate forests and pockets of Alberta's boreal forest act as refugia for diverse species during this time of accelerated climate change. These areas, however, are not themselves entirely immune to change as we have seen lately with the advent of catastrophic fires throughout the northern boreal. As we live with, observe and adapt to climatic shifts in these forest ecosystems, we also acknowledge a growing need to share our lived experiences and our research with the larger world. Jenna's writing and storytelling project holds connective space for these communities by weaving together narratives of these magnificent forests and by providing opportunities for communities to hear and connect with one another across borders.