Here are some samples of classes, tutorials, and workshops I teach on Zoom and in-person
Life Stories: Creativity, Connection, and Community, How to Walk, Let’s Get Weird
When I was a senior in high school, I broke my neck in three places in a horrific car accident. For many weeks, they were not sure I was going to ever be mobile again. For many months I lived in the peculiar, attended isolation of ICUs, hospital operating rooms, and on gurneys in hallways and treatment rooms. While my own experience shrinks in comparison to today’s existential crises, climate chaos and global pandemic, I continue to call on those days in the hospital to create and align my own life story. That experience established my values.
One year after the accident, I was deemed well enough to go away to college. I would sit under the trees writing my story and feeling this deep well of gratefulness. I also studied Buddhist art history and began my meditation practice. This added another layer of reflection and awareness, another tantric thread in my own life story. When I graduated from college I started work as a journalist, gathering others’ life stories as a features writer and photographer. Over the years, my story-gathering as a journalist and creative writer has taken me to Antarctica for four months, to Bangkok, Thailand, for a couple of years; to Patagonia, Argentina; Oxford, England for a summer; as well as to Australia, Italy, South Africa, on cross-country trains in the United States, and to New Zealand, where I was the first Fulbright Fellow in Antarctic Studies. Each of these journeys and adventures and explorations changed me. Travel always does.
But in particular, much of my mindset about Life Stories — and world view — took root by living in and around Antarctica. I was there as a reporter with the environmental activist group Greenpeace. Their mission was simple: Let’s save the world. World, in this case, meant Antarctica. And we succeeded in telling a story of Antarctica, through images and words that supported arguments for a moratorium on mining and other potential commercial activity. I recall one late night, together in the lounge of the ship, dancing to Midnight Oil, an ecstatic, boot-stomping dance, a dance of release and of joy as our purpose and ideals and values met the story we enacted and recorded.
Through all of these experiences, I learned so much from The World: How we gather across diverse cultures to tell our stories, what it means to listen, how to explore the heat and poetics of your own story – and the stories of others. The World begs for our individual stories because this is how we understand the rich, beautiful diversity of human and more-than-human life on Earth – and the cosmos.
My Life Stories courses are designed for all, and when I say all, I mean it. Through writing prompts, careful attention to craft, individualized reading lists, and feedback, Life Stories courses are designed to help each writer find and hear their voice. We support one another in group workshops. We learn how to silence the common internal voice that gets in the way of our creativity so we can complete our varied stories. We all have a story to tell. Life Stories teaches you how to tell yours well.
All are welcome. New writers will leave with a plan for how to develop their voice through reading and regular writing assignments. Experienced writers will refresh their revision work and map out longer-format forms, such as essay collections, novels, and memoirs.
Creative practice is transformative.
Life Stories is about writing with power and authority about who you are, what you have experienced, and the crucial contexts and histories. It’s a robust method for team building at companies and nonprofit organizations. Life Stories can also help you find direction and meaning in your life, by defining purpose. Maybe you have devoted decades to rearing a family. Maybe you have been working to establish financial stability. It can be challenging to shift courses. Life Stories can help you create a roadmap by reflecting on your ideal future. It can also mean making a public commitment to your goals.
Everyone has a story to tell. Tell it well. That is where Life Stories come in.
Come work with our nurturing community.
I don’t just like helping people tell their stories, I love it.
And I have been doing it for long enough with enough bona fide results to humbly add: I am particularly aware of each writer’s unique voice. I help you write and revise toward the most powerful and authoritative words to shape your stories. Your story matters. Let’s work on it together.
I have worked with students and writers of all varieties — from leading designers writing books about their creative practices and world view, to memoirists working to tell the stories of their experiences. I help my students gain confidence in their writing, share writing and revision strategies and tactics, and inspire them to get their work done and out into the world.
That is, I don’t have an aesthetic stamp I put on my clients and students. Another way of saying this: You don’t end up sounding like me.
Please reach out to me with any questions — take a look at my current courses and 1:1 offerings. I am also happy to collaborate on modifying my teaching to align with your goals or business needs.
CLASSES
Life Stories
Here’s an example of one of our classes: We meet in San Francisco’s Presidio and walk the Ecology Trail. We will meet at the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture Spire and then walk from Inspiration Point down to the Main Post. From the Main Post, we will walk to River of Wood and then loop back to Lucas Arts, where we will end with a robust writing/reading session. From our notes, we will begin shaping essays based on the classic form of the essay: The Walk.
To read in advance (and to discuss during our sessions):
- Street Haunting, Virginia Woolf (essay)
- Here Is Where I Walk, Leslie Carol Roberts (On Slug Trails)
Tools: Sturdy, comfortable walking shoes, water bottle, snacks (there is no food for sale in the Presidio); pens and pencils; notebook; phone camera and notes app if you prefer to record your views that way.
There are a variety of apps that support plant etc identification; these are handy if you are of the mindset to name very precisely what you see in the moment.
Briefly about me:
I am a journalist, author, professor, and academic administrator who is Chair of MFA Writing and have served as Dean of Design and Chair of MFA Design. I like working with writers who identify as writers equally with people who don’t: I teach designers of all stripes how to use language to support their made work, from Fashion to IxD to Architecture.
I am a Fulbright Fellow and NEA recipient and an award-winning writer. My areas of research expertise are Antarctica, climate change, sustainable systems, learning experience design, and curricular design. I know how to ask the right questions to work with power and authority across many subject areas — and I do this in large part by not fearing being the so-called “dumb guy.” This is how you learn: By simply asking questions and being ready to listen. It is a tool for the best journalists, writers, and designers. I am also a founder of the ECOPOESIS Project and a member of the Architectural Ecologies Lab, so I make ecological forms, across sound and light and through experience design. And I write about these ideas and thoughts for textbooks and magazines and journals.
It’s hard to write about yourself (which is one reason design firms hire me) so I thought I would share a beautiful intro someone did for me before I delivered a recent talk:
“Leslie Carol Roberts argues that ecology is everything and that in the Presidio this can be seen and experienced in particularly fine detail, from the historic forest to the work of Andy Goldsworthy, to the coyotes who patrol the dunes by her home. As she travels the paths of the Presidio, the historic forest offers a place of quiet contemplation, surrounded by bay, ocean and city, hardwiring into its residents and recreationists a love for and of trees and its diverse plant and animal life. Forest, dunes, oceans offer a chance at radical self-knowledge, she reasons, illuminating our place and our belonging to varied ecological zones. Her work is playful and comedic, as she engages with an empath in a desert tent, on a guided journey through the Earth, emerging with an encounter with her newfound spirit animal, the wolf. Here Is Where I Walk is a skilled fusion of research in the botanical sciences, the humanities and Literature. She hopes to reestablish our ties to the woods and trees and rocks and moles that live as our colleagues in diverse habitats around the world. In doing so, she hopes to help us care more about what we see and exist with each day, the non-human and the human, as we each traverse Earth.”
My first book, The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica, (Nebraska, 2008; Bison Books, 2012) explores human engagement with the myth, ecologies, and material culture of Antarctica, showing polar presence and its representation across museum and book culture.
My second book, Here Is Where I Walk: Episodes from a Life in the Forest (2019, Nevada), continues my work as an eco-memoirist — part travelogue, part personal reflection, part philosophical musing on the role of more-than-humans and our changing climate.
As a journalist and essayist, my work has been widely published in newspapers and magazines in the US and abroad.
EDITORIAL CONSULTING
1:1 Book consultations/developmental editing. My clients have included designers, publishing companies, artists, architects, fashion designers, among others.
Maybe you have a book that would appeal to a lot of readers; maybe you want to write a family history for your immediate family. Working 1:1 we can identify how to scaffold, plot, and write your book.