Transcendentalism Workshops

This workshop series meets on four consecutive Wednesdays: September 9, 16, 23, and 30, from 4:00–6:00 p.m. Because each session builds on the previous one, participants are expected to attend all four sessions. Registration is required and limited to 12 participants. Please register to attend in person.

When William Ellery Channing claimed in an 1828 sermon that “we are brought into harmony with the creation” in proportion to our pursuit of our own “likeness to God,” he could not have known that his theology would help inspire a literary tradition that continues to explore spiritual growth through encounters with the natural world. American nature writing developed some of its strongest roots in the ideas of Channing and the American Transcendentalists he influenced. Emerson explored selfhood and spirituality through nature, famously writing of standing in the woods and sensing that he was “part and parcel of God.” Thoreau likewise wrote of the spiritual expansiveness he experienced through his connection with the natural world. This tradition extends through writers such as John Muir, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and Kathleen Dean Moore. Today, nature writers continue to explore the spiritual dimensions of life through encounters with the more-than-human world.

In this creative nonfiction workshop, participants will practice nature writing as an expression and exploration of spirituality. Before the first session, participants will be invited to read brief excerpts from texts central to the nature writing tradition. During the workshop, participants will discuss the readings and elements of writerly craft, focusing on strategies authors have used to explore, reveal, and experience spirituality through nature. Sessions will also include guided writing exercises and prompts. Between meetings, participants will be invited to complete writing exercises that may inform future discussions. At the conclusion of the series, the instructor will provide individual feedback on a short essay submitted by each participant.

Rochelle L. Johnson received the 2026 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and the 2025 Georgia Review Prose Prize for her essay “Phantom Pains,” which was also featured by Longreads, Memoir Land, and Nature. A recipient of the Carnegie Foundation’s Idaho Professor of the Year Award and the 2024 Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award from the Idaho Humanities Council, Johnson is the author of numerous creative and scholarly works, including Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation. She has also coedited several volumes, including Thoreau in an Age of Crisis.

A leading scholar of nineteenth-century naturalist Susan Fenimore Cooper, Johnson’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Beinecke Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other organizations. She holds the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at the College of Idaho, where she teaches environmental studies, and serves as the 2026 Robert Frost Chair at the Bread Loaf School of English, where she teaches literature and creative writing. She is a past president of both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Thoreau Society.

In “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “it seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object.” In this day-long workshop, participants will devote sustained attention to plants, observing in careful detail how they reveal themselves to the senses and how they live within dynamic ecological relationships.

Drawing on the work of Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the workshop will incorporate artistic practices — including pencil drawing and writing exercises — as methods for cultivating new ways of perceiving the natural world. As Thoreau observed, “the question is not what you look at, but how you look, and whether you see.”

Approaching transcendentalism as a living contemplative practice, the workshop invites participants to deepen their powers of observation and imagination through attentive engagement with the living wholeness of the plant world.

Ryan Shea is a full-time researcher and educator at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York. Previously, he taught environmental philosophy, philosophy of science, interdisciplinary humanities, and nature writing at Providence College for eight years. He is also a doctoral researcher with MESH (Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities) at the University of Cologne in Germany.

His research seeks to develop the practice of experiential and participatory ecology, with a focus on metamorphosis in plants and insects. His work is informed by the tradition of Goethean transformative phenomenology—especially the work of Craig Holdrege, Mark Riegner, Henri Bortoft, Jochen Bockemühl, and Andreas Suchantke—which develops new ways of seeing that allow the whole to be directly experienced through the part.

Shea is the editor of The Nature Institute’s in-house publication, In Context, and co-producer of its podcast, In Dialogue with Nature. He also co-edited a recent translation of Goethean biologist Andreas Suchantke’s Insect Forms and Patterns: Exploring the Language of Nature.

Please note: Registration is required for this workshop. Participation is limited to 15 attendees, who must commit to attending both days: Friday, October 2, and Saturday, October 3. Visit the event registration page to register.

Friday, October 2 | 3:30–5:00 pm - Opening Session: Talk and Discussion
Imaginative Seeing in Goethe, Coleridge, and Emerson: Pathways to a Phenomenological Ecology

Saturday, October 3 | 9:00–5:00 pm - Workshop
Living Transcendentalism: Phenomenological Ecology and Participating in Nature’s Wholeness

Workshop Description: Emerson once wrote that “it seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object.” In this day-long workshop, we will be giving our full attention to plants, noticing in loving detail how they reveal themselves to our senses, and how they dynamically live in their unique ecological contexts. Following the lead of Emerson and Thoreau, we will take up artistic practices — pencil drawing and writing exercises — as means for cultivating new organs of perception. As Thoreau observed, “the question is not what you look at, but how you look, and whether you see.” Our workshop day together approaches transcendentalism as a living phenomenological practice that teaches us how to see by enabling us to imaginatively participate in the living wholeness of the plant world.

Saturday schedule:

9:00-10:30. Session 1

10:30-11:00. BREAK

11:00-12:30. Session 2

12:30-1:30. LUNCH

1:30-3:00. Session 3

3:00-3:30. BREAK

3:30-5:00. Session 4