Megan Mayhew-Bergman

Environmental Lit Workshop: Environmentalist Literature and Action
Some would say we live in supremely disturbing times. A pandemic; the sixth extinction; fascism within democracies and militant nationalisms; climate apartheid, and a political economy based around the commodification and exploitation of people and the earth. In this course careful reading and analysis is paired with literary conversation and action. Course readings represent a wide array of environmental justice in differing genres. While we respond to assigned texts, we will simultaneously write our way toward an environmental literature of our own design. 3 hrs. lect.

The Feminine Heroic
In this class we will explore the hero’s journey in literature as it relates to women and the natural world: who gets to go on the adventure, and who arrives home, transformed? How do race and gender complicate the traditional man-versus-nature narrative? We will discuss character agency, narrative authority, style, and structure — and look at texts where women undertake the journey, including work by Isak Dinesen, Annie Dillard, Camille Dungy, Rachel Carson, Anne LeBastille, Rahawa Haile, and Pam Houston. Students will generate creative and critical work. 3 hrs. sem.

Advanced Non-Fiction Workshop: Writing Truthfully in Turbulent Times
To best assist us in finding our voices, this course plumbs the diversity of nonfiction as a genre and requires us to identify narratives larger than the self. So much is currently at stake. The work we read this semester will underline this for us. We will read new nonfiction works by an eclectic group of authors and thereby deepen our understandings of what it means to live in a time of severe ecological distress, extreme inequality, and virulent strains of all sorts of deadliness, as well as a time of intense hope, and we will write toward the conception of a book manuscript. (any 100-level CRWR course and Instructor Approval) 3 hrs. sem.

Writing Place: Class and Conservation in the American South
In this course we will examine non-traditional conservationists and conservation writing in the American South, with a focus on Georgia and South Carolina. We will read Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood; work about and by Carol Ruckduschel; John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid; work about MaVynee Betsch; and J. Drew Lanham's Home Place. We'll engage virtually with practicing southern conservationists, look for the ways scientists and self-taught scientists are leaning into underrepresented spaces, and, through our own writing, investigate meaningful and rich connections to place. This course counts as a humanities cognate for environmental studies majors.