How to Rewild Your Writing Practice

The classroom of my first creative writing workshop made me claustrophobic. Grey-white walls and fluorescent lights humming overhead. Desks arranged in a circle, metal frames with plastic tops. The windows were small, high up on the wall. Outside lay Lincoln Park, its grasses and paths visible only if I craned my neck.

The instructor handed out syllabi printed on white paper. We would study the masters, imitate their forms, and workshop our pieces in this room for sixteen weeks.

I’ve taken eight creative writing classes in my Undergraduate career pursuing my English Honours BA degree at Mount Royal University in Calgary. Only in one—*CRWT 3304 Advanced Nonfiction: Writing Place*—was the environment ever deliberately brought up as more than setting, as something alive and consequential. Even then, I experienced my creative writing minor in the stuffy, restrictive brutalist classrooms of Mount Royal University’s campus.

Never once did we visit Lincoln Park, Charlton Lake, the third-floor greenhouse, the Amphitheater, or the large sprawling sports fields that surrounded us. We sat inside, discussing words on pages about places we weren’t in. As I reached the end of my undergraduate degree, I couldn’t help but wonder, *why not?*

## The Workshop Disease

You may not know this, but nearly all creative writing workshops operate based on the [Iowa Writers’ Workshop](https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/about/about-workshop/history). It’s considered a sacred, untouchable monument. [Born in 1936](https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature/), the methodology was actually shaped by Paul Engle’s Cold War paranoia and [CIA money funneled through front organizations](https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-the-cia-turned-american-literature-into-a-content-farm/), designed to produce a specific kind of American writer. Who? The apolitical, individualist, technically proficient, and spiritually neutered.

The workshop model has calcified—no, *ossified*—into dogma. Nearly a century unchanged. A content farm optimized for “more Hemingway, less Dos Passos,” stamping out writers with the industrial efficiency of a bottling plant.

But the real violence isn’t what the workshop teaches. It’s *where*.

The sterile classroom ignores your environment, actively amputating your connection to the living world. Severs. Cauterizes. Leaves scar tissue where ecological consciousness should pulse.

**The mind that writes cannot be separated from the body that breathes.** That body cannot be separated from the place it inhabits. As Diane Ackerman wrote, [“our senses define the edge of consciousness.”](https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/06/diane-ackerman-a-natural-history-of-the-senses-2/) Yet we’re taught that creativity happens *despite* place, *despite* body, *