Join Orion and the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN) to celebrate Orion’s Summer 2025 issue, The Future Is Fungi. This free virtual event will feature two contributors from the issue—award-winning writers and Orion contributing editors Erica Berry and Meera Subramanian—in a conversation moderated by Theodore Ross, editor-in-chief of FERN, Orion’s publication partner on one of the features in the issue.

So often, when humans look at mushrooms, we’re apt to see solutions—a cure, a trip, a metaphor, an answer to a problem that we probably created in the first place. In this issue of Orion, we seek to let the mushroom be, simply, itself; a marvel of mystery and interconnectedness that structures our world in ways we still don’t fully understand. Featuring contributions from Maria Popova, Merlin Sheldrake, Jeff VanderMeer, Lidia Yuknavitch, and this event’s panelists, the issue asks not what we should do with mushrooms, but how we can live alongside them.

Registration required.

From Literary Arts:

Here is an opportunity to share or listen to one page of work in progress from talented writers from everywhere. Come with a single page of work and sign up to read—or come to listen and prepare to be inspired.

Our host is the one and only, Emme Lund. July’s featured reader is 2024 Oregon Book Award winner Erica Berry.

From Lewis and Clark College:

The Fir Acres Writing Workshop is a premier, established summer writing program open to rising 10th, 11th, and 12th graders who are eager to practice writing in its many forms.

Spring Creek Project Presents: Earth Words: The Pacific Northwest's Premier Environmental Writing Showcase

In these times of cultural upheaval, when the natural world is facing unprecedented pressures and losses, stories about our relationship to the Earth and all its creatures must be at the heart of resistance and renewal. Along with incisive truth-telling, we need joyful celebrations to nurture community, sustain activism, and deepen our understanding of kinship and interconnectedness with all beings.

Earth Words will be an evening to celebrate and uplift the many kinds of environmental writing we need in this moment in history: stories that help us imagine new futures, writing that deepens our love for the world, and voices that resoundingly speak up for justice for people and our more-than-human kin. The evening will feature the work of five celebrated writers who will fill the concert hall with good words for this world:

• Lynda Mapes, Seattle Times reporter and author, most recently of The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests

• CMarie Fuhrman, poet, editor, and author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return

• Sierra Crane Murdoch, journalist, essayist, and author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Oregon Book Award

• Lyanda Lynn Haupt, naturalist, ecophilosopher, and author, most recently of Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

• Erica Berry, essayist and author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, winner of the Oregon Book Award and shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Book Award

Award-winning writer and poet Joe Wilkins will emcee this inaugural year of Earth Words, which will become an annual environmental writing showcase at PRAx.

How might narratives from history, literature, or the natural world complement the telling of our own personal life stories? And how do you balance pivoting between interior and exterior landscapes without losing the reader?

In this 90-minute craft workshop, Erica Berry—author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron, 2023) and of researched personal essays for The New York Times, The Guardian, Outside, Orion, The Yale Review, among other publications—will share creative techniques and structural advice for navigating this buzzy genre, commonly referred to as “memoir-plus” in the publishing industry. 

From discussing what makes a successful ‘braid,’ to plotting out the writing process with these more experimental narrative structures, this interactive class will include analysis of short readings as well as shared (and take-home) generative prompts.

with ELEANOR HENDERSON, GINA CHUNG, ROY GUZMAN, AND HENRY HOKE -

AWP CONFERENCE, LOS ANGELES

Join us on November 1st at Portland State University where we will premiere six commissioned compositions inspired by six Oregon Book Award finalists and winners’ works! The 12-member ensemble performance draws literature by Oregonians spanning from a children’s book reimagining a Japanese folktale to a guide to keeping chickens in the city in Playing With Words and the sounds presented on stage are equally expansive.

Friday, November 1st, 2024, PSU’s Lincoln Recital Hall- Tickets on sale now: https://pjce.org/event/playing-with-words-pjce-literary-arts/

Doors at 7 PM, music begins at 7:30 PM

The composer/literary pairings are: 

• Hans Barkliss inspired by Josephine Woolington’s Where We Call Home: Lands, Seas, and Skies of the Pacific Northwest

• Nicole Buetti inspired by Tove Danovich Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them

• Andrew Durkin inspired by Erica Berry’s Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear

• Gordon Lee inspired by Stephanie Adams-Santos’ Dream of Xibalba

• Ryan Meagher inspired by Patrick DeWitt’s The Librarianist

• Tim Willcox inspired by Waka T. Brown’s The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura

In conversation with Diana Helmuth, author of The Witching Year

https://www.bainbridgebookfestival.org/2024-festival/schedule/

Pendleton Arts Center, on topic of ‘Fear and Belonging,’ with Bobby Fossek and Wendy Bingham.

Moderated by Callum Angus.

Circling the Wolf: What Kaleidoscopic Thinking Can Teach Us About Interconnection

Erica Berry began studying wolf repopulation because of its impact on her own family in the American west, which included a sheep farmer, hunters, and environmentalists. What began as an academic Environmental Studies project soon turned into a decade of obsession, where she researched stories about wolves both real and symbolic from around the world, leading to her nonfiction debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron/Macmillan, 2023). Weaving science, history, journalism, folklore, anthropology, and personal writing, Wolfish is a genre-crossing book that explores not only the biological wolf, but the very human emotions (fear, freedom, ferocity) that Berry grew up associating the animal with. In this keynote, which includes a short reading, she will talk about how and why she took this kaleidoscopic approach, making a case for what thinking omnivorously—porously moving between disciplines, and between self and subject—can teach us about environmental interconnectedness.

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/7717056150251/WN_zGckzgFjSeyasHAwvQh-mA

Author Erica Berry, will present "Changing Earth, Changing Stories: Finding New Models Of Environmental Storytelling" in Willamette University’s Mary Stuart Rogers Music Center, Hudson Concert Hall at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Erica Berry is author of the book Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron Books, 2023), a kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, science, cultural criticism, journalism and folklore. Researched over the course of a decade, the book has its roots in an Environmental Studies thesis she wrote about wolf repopulation in her home state of Oregon. Her academic project became personal after a handful of alarming encounters left Berry deeply rattled—not only afraid of being a woman in the world, but wary of the narratives she had inherited about fear, threat, and who could be predator and who could be prey. In untangling the mythos of the ‘Big Bad Wolf,’ Wolfish examines cultural narratives of wilderness, gender, power, and the body, offering new expressions for bravery in a warming world. With a family that includes hunters, a sheep farmer, and a former Sierra Club president, Berry’s exploration of how humans live beside wolves becomes a call for how we can better live beside one another.

The event is sponsored by the Dempsey Foundation and Willamette University’s Environmental Science Department. For more information, contact Joe Bowersox at jbowerso@willamette.edu

Mon, April 1 from 7:00 pm PDT

Literary Arts

925 SW Washington Street Portland, OR 97205

Please join us for a reading featuring some of this year’s Oregon Book Awards finalists in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry:

Creative Nonfiction:
Erica Berry
Alyssa Graybeal
Steven Moore

Fiction:
Patrick deWitt
Marcelle Heath
Lydia Kiesling
Rachel King
Jen Wheeler

Poetry:
Stephanie Adams-Santos
Jessica E. Johnson
Sara Quinn Rivara

I will be in conversation about Wolfish at the Portland Book Festival! Panel details TBA.

The faculty of the Attic Institute’s Atheneum -Brian Benson, Lee Montgomery, Erica Berry, and Joanna Rose - read from new work-in-progress.

Location: Rose City Book Pub, 1329 NE Fremont St.

A conversation featuring Erica Berry, Liz Weinberg, Becky Mandelbaum, and Caitlin Scarano.

In our divided social and political context, what can we learn from narratives about animals? What are the ethics, challenges, and joys of writing and imagining the nonhuman world? How can we undo the constructed divide between humans and animals? In this reading and conversation, four writers from across genres will read from their own animal narratives and discuss what it means to write from, for, and to nonhuman beings.  

Wolfish is the September Book Club selection for Katherine May’s ‘True Stories Book Club.’ I will be in conversation with her via ZOOM, at 11am PST, available to all who subscribe to her newsletter:

Erica Berry, author of WOLFISH, in conversation with Linda Kinstler, author of COME TO THIS COURT AND CRY and 2023 Nonfiction Whiting Award winner.

Brookland Location - 625 MONROE ST NE, WASHINGTON, D.C.