A writing course with local author and educator, Natalie Rose Dyer
What’s on offer: 6 walks / 6 weeks of writing with a local Yarra Ranges author, Natalie Rose Dyer, who teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Melbourne.
The first hour will be dedicated to the discussion of the weekly reading at a local cafe, and the next two hours will be dedicated to walking in the Yarra Ranges, and undertaking writing exercises.
Natalie will workshop a final piece of writing with each student, a short essay, towards publication in a literary journal.
Course Details:
Duration: 6 weeks, with one session per week
Dates: 30th of August 2025 until 25th October, 2025, 9-12pm
Location: Various Yarra Ranges trails
Cost: $465
Outcome: A polished essay for publication
Facilitator: Natalie Rose Dyer, author, poet, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne
Why Join This Course?
This course is designed for writers, ecologists, and activists interested in deepening their engagement with place through language. Participants will:
Learn how to ethically represent landscapes in creative writing
Develop a personal writing practice rooted in ecological awareness
Receive editorial feedback on a 1500-word essay for publication
Explore the intersections of literature, activism, and environmental philosophy
Course Description:
We will take a series of walks in the Yarra Ranges area in order to bear witness to this environmental ecology poetically and precisely, including discussing human predation and impacts of the Anthropocene. We will survey differentiated approaches to writing environmental ecologies drawing on a set of diversified writers who have explored their relationship to landscape, using them as springboards for our own writing: from Matsuo Basho, to Alexis Wright, to Virginia Woolf, Nan Shepherd, Kathleen Jamie, Olivia Laing, and many more. We will consider what the ethical implications of writing on stolen lands are and pontificate how we might come to negotiate writing place beyond the pastoral, towards embracing a decolonial writing practice. We will chart mind wandering and productive identity deformation and reformation in the consideration of the complexities of being migrated into place. We will contemplate our embodied reciprocity with a mountain ecology. We will undertake field work writing against the romanticisation of wildscapes, but rather in consideration of the impacts of human predation in The Dandenong Ranges, including settler colonisation of the area, the impacts of introduced flora and fauna, and in more recent times the use of glyphosates, as well as littering caused by increasing tourism, and so on. We will think about how place influences the way we understand ourselves and how walking a new geographical terrain can help us to change our perspectives. We will consider walking as an affirmative access to planetary thought and feeling, which can be restorative, but also a form of political activism. At the end of the course you will have written at least one essay, which will be workshopped with Natalie, and thereafter ready to place with a literary journal. Ambitious authors will use this course as a template and springboard for writing a book on a social and environmental ecology of their choice. Please note that the walks are mostly easy to moderate. This course is for writers at all levels of experience (although of course more writing experience will enhance skill set and publishing prospects).
Week 1: Writing on Stolen Lands/ No Pastoral Comfort
9am–12pm, 30th August, 2025
Week 2: Mind Wandering/ On Getting Migrated into Place
9am–12pm, 6th September, 2025
Week 3: Becoming the Mountain to Write the Mountain
9am–12pm, 13th September, 2025
Week 4: Fieldwork Writing in the Anthropocene
9am–12pm, 11th October, 2025
Week 5: Making New Maps/ What Are Some of Your Maps?
9am–12pm, 18th October, 2025
Week 6: Re-enchanting the Landscape: Environmental & Political Activism
9am–12pm, 25th October, 2025
About the Instructor
Natalie Rose Dyer currently teaches into the Creative Writing Program at The University of Melbourne where she is an Honorary Research Fellow. She completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne (2017) where she also earned an MFA (2010) with an Australian Postgraduate Award. Natalie was the recipient of The Peter Steele Poetry Award in 2021 towards the completion of her first poetry manuscript (forthcoming). She was recently highly commended for the 2024 Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize for poems towards her first collection. Selected poetry is widely published in journals including Meanjin Quarterly, Australian Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellors Anthology, Wisconsin Review and many more. Natalie’s book Notes on a Wild Fluiditywas published with Palgrave (2020) and in it she takes a fresh look at the feminist politics of corporeality. https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030598129#reviews
Writing Ecologies in the Yarra Ranges
A writing course with local author and educator, Natalie Rose Dyer
What’s on offer: 6 walks / 6 weeks of writing with a local Yarra Ranges author, Natalie Rose Dyer, who teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Melbourne.
The first hour will be dedicated to the discussion of the weekly reading at a local cafe, and the next two hours will be dedicated to walking in the Yarra Ranges, and undertaking writing exercises.
Natalie will workshop a final piece of writing with each student, a short essay, towards publication in a literary journal.
Course Details:
Why Join This Course?
This course is designed for writers, ecologists, and activists interested in deepening their engagement with place through language. Participants will:
Course Description:
We will take a series of walks in the Yarra Ranges area in order to bear witness to this environmental ecology poetically and precisely, including discussing human predation and impacts of the Anthropocene. We will survey differentiated approaches to writing environmental ecologies drawing on a set of diversified writers who have explored their relationship to landscape, using them as springboards for our own writing: from Matsuo Basho, to Alexis Wright, to Virginia Woolf, Nan Shepherd, Kathleen Jamie, Olivia Laing, and many more. We will consider what the ethical implications of writing on stolen lands are and pontificate how we might come to negotiate writing place beyond the pastoral, towards embracing a decolonial writing practice. We will chart mind wandering and productive identity deformation and reformation in the consideration of the complexities of being migrated into place. We will contemplate our embodied reciprocity with a mountain ecology. We will undertake field work writing against the romanticisation of wildscapes, but rather in consideration of the impacts of human predation in The Dandenong Ranges, including settler colonisation of the area, the impacts of introduced flora and fauna, and in more recent times the use of glyphosates, as well as littering caused by increasing tourism, and so on. We will think about how place influences the way we understand ourselves and how walking a new geographical terrain can help us to change our perspectives. We will consider walking as an affirmative access to planetary thought and feeling, which can be restorative, but also a form of political activism. At the end of the course you will have written at least one essay, which will be workshopped with Natalie, and thereafter ready to place with a literary journal. Ambitious authors will use this course as a template and springboard for writing a book on a social and environmental ecology of their choice. Please note that the walks are mostly easy to moderate. This course is for writers at all levels of experience (although of course more writing experience will enhance skill set and publishing prospects).
Week 1: Writing on Stolen Lands/ No Pastoral Comfort
9am–12pm, 30th August, 2025
Week 2: Mind Wandering/ On Getting Migrated into Place
9am–12pm, 6th September, 2025
Week 3: Becoming the Mountain to Write the Mountain
9am–12pm, 13th September, 2025
Week 4: Fieldwork Writing in the Anthropocene
9am–12pm, 11th October, 2025
Week 5: Making New Maps/ What Are Some of Your Maps?
9am–12pm, 18th October, 2025
Week 6: Re-enchanting the Landscape: Environmental & Political Activism
9am–12pm, 25th October, 2025
About the Instructor
Natalie Rose Dyer currently teaches into the Creative Writing Program at The University of Melbourne where she is an Honorary Research Fellow. She completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne (2017) where she also earned an MFA (2010) with an Australian Postgraduate Award. Natalie was the recipient of The Peter Steele Poetry Award in 2021 towards the completion of her first poetry manuscript (forthcoming). She was recently highly commended for the 2024 Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize for poems towards her first collection. Selected poetry is widely published in journals including Meanjin Quarterly, Australian Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellors Anthology, Wisconsin Review and many more. Natalie’s book Notes on a Wild Fluidity was published with Palgrave (2020) and in it she takes a fresh look at the feminist politics of corporeality. https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030598129#reviews
Her second book of essays Nothing But a Fine Nerve Meter; New Maps at the Planetary Turn is forthcoming in 2025 with Revolutionaries https://www.revolutionaries.com.au/about-revolt
Email: mail@natalierosedyer.com to express your interest and sign up for the course.
For more on Natalie’s work, visit natalierosedyer.com.
Sign Up
To register or inquire further, contact Natalie Rose Dyer at mail@natalierosedyer.com.
Limited spaces available.