What might a language for the future – or for this very moment, shapeshifting as it is – look like when imagined from the bodies, experiences, desires, of the other-than-human world, as it stands and as it may yet be? Join this all-genre workshop to explore the materials of our local landscape and their possible afterlives, consider alternate ways of connecting to the vulnerable but still vital spaces we inhabit, and develop language to imagine and create new ways of being. The workshop will be held within the space of The Future of Here, a new collaborative exhibition at the Peale Museum that grows from a Johns Hopkins University class co-taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian and artist Jordan Tierney. The exhibit encourages viewers to imagine a future culture of place here that might build upon the artifacts we leave behind. Working with local poet and essayist Lia Purpura, we invite you to tune into the whispers of our earthly existence and to weave a restorative tapestry through language. In partnership with the Ivy Bookshop, the event will include a pop-up bookshop where visitors can browse and purchase selected works of environmental writing, including many that inspired the exhibition itself.

Lia Purpura is the author of ten collections, including essays, poems, and translations. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes.  Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. Purpura has served as Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Loyola University; other teaching venues include the low-residency Rainier Writing Workshop, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program, as well as workshops at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, and the Glenwood Life Recovery Center. Her newest collections are It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems) and All the Fierce Tethers (essays).