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Literature in the Last Best Place: Montana’s Nature Writing

Workshop coordinated between Research Area 9: Ecology and the Study of Culture and the IPP/GCSC

When

Oct 29, 2025 from 02:00 to 04:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Where

SR 109 (GCSC)

Contact Name

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This workshop offers participants an immersive exploration into the rich literary landscape of Montana, emphasizing the deep connection between place and writing. Starting off with some geographical, historical, and cultural facts about the Big Sky Country, we will go on to explore its place-based storytelling: both the treasured beauty and some harsh realities. From the established canonical writers, such as James Welch (i.a. Fools Crow, 1986; Winter in the Blood, 1974), William Kittredge (i.a. Hole in the Sky, 1992; We Are Not in This Together: Stories, 1984), and Annick Smith (Homestead, 1995; Crossing the Plains with Bruno, 2015; co-producer of A River Runs Through It, 1992) to the most contemporary authors such as Bryce Andrews (i.a. Down from the Mountain, 2019; Holding Fire, 2023) and Chris La Tray (Becoming Little Shell, 2024), we will discuss the issues of land ethics, wilderness and preservation, exploitation and restitution, all of which are connected with the meta-questions of identity, belonging, and care. More than that, we will focus on the intricacies of human-nature connection by looking into how Montana writers have used literature to interrogate, challenge, and reimagine the human-nature binary, and how environmental concerns are recognized, exposed, and acted upon through narrative and reflective forms. The intricacies of human-nature relationships will also be analyzed in terms of human histories and social complexities, particularly the fraught history of conflict and coexistence between settlers and Indigenous peoples. We investigate how writers have contextualized and represented their regional challenges in time and what responses and solutions emerge from their texts. A few short texts will be distributed before the seminar to make participants acquainted with the subject. Also, our workshop will certainly benefit from active involvement, and I would like to receive questions referring both to the general subject of environmental criticism and to the particular theme of our workshop, as well as the provided text fragments.

Please send your questions to: kkasia@amu.edu.pl 

//Dr. Katarzyna Macedulska is assistant professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.

Please register on Stud.IP to participate.