Meet the Teaching Artist: Miranda Schmidt on Noticing, the Carrier Bag, and Writing with the More-Than-Human
by Writing Workshops Staff
An hour ago
There is a difference between writing about nature and writing with it. The Brontës knew it. Ursula K. Le Guin, who composed her novels with cats nearby, knew it. Ada Limón, whose poems live in conversation with trees, knows it. In Writing with Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems, a generative six-week Zoom workshop beginning Monday, July 6, 2026, novelist and poet Miranda Schmidt builds a class around precisely that distinction.
Schmidt, whose debut novel Leafskin (Stillhouse Press, 2025) blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, has spent years thinking about how writing happens in partnership with the more-than-human world. In this all-levels, cross-genre workshop at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, students will generate six new pieces of writing in response to weekly prompts that draw on gardens, pets, animals, trees, and ecosystems. Along the way, they will sharpen the practice Schmidt considers foundational to writing: noticing. They will meet alternative narrative shapes that move beyond the conventional rising-action arc. And they will leave with a portfolio of new work and a set of practices to keep going long after the final Monday.
It is a class for writers who have ever drafted a poem beside a window, scribbled at the base of a tree, or written with a sleeping dog underfoot, and wondered if those companions are part of the work.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Miranda:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Miranda. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Miranda Schmidt: I'm a writer of prose and poetry who likes to explore hybrid forms, folklore, and connections with nature. I live in Portland, Oregon but grew up in the Midwest outside Chicago and I do my writing alongside raising a young kid and working in university marketing. I'm an unrepentant cat person.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Miranda Schmidt: I've often found myself instinctively writing through my sense of connection with nature, or the more-than-human, but that's not something that was generally brought up in my creative writing classes. Often, nature was relegated to pretty descriptions or looked at only through the lens of setting. But I felt like I was writing in a kind of partnership with the more-than-human. The process of writing has so often been a form of connecting with the landscape, the sky, the ground, the trees, the animals, for me. I would have loved to experience that in a class, which is one reason I teach the classes I do now.
"In this class, we'll learn to notice more, to sharpen our perceptions, to take in more detail and to write from that noticing."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Miranda Schmidt: Noticing. We so often move through our world without noticing so much of what is happening around us. The way the trees are leafing or the birds that are going about their lives outside our windows. Even the way our pets or indoor plants exist throughout the day. In this class, we'll learn to notice more, to sharpen our perceptions, to take in more detail and to write from that noticing.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Miranda Schmidt: "In the darkest night, there is language that asks what we are made of, that insists on imagining into the first-person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabit this planet; language that connects us to one another." - Han Kang, Light and Thread
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Miranda Schmidt: I love to teach alternative narrative structures that help us to work outside the Freytag Pyramid that many of us were taught was the shape a story should take. Whenever I teach about these, whether in a lesson or a full in-depth course, I see so many lightbulbs going off for students and it reminds me of the feeling I had when I first read Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" which describes a story that is shaped as bag that is holding all these pieces in relation to one another. And I had never thought of a story as being shaped in that way. It was the first time I encountered that possibility. And it just opened up whole worlds of potential for my writing. I love to see that happening for students when they begin to think about the shapes of their novels in entirely new ways.
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.
Miranda Schmidt: This is one I like to do when I'm revising. I look for the words I repeat frequently in that specific work and just note them in a short list. Not only is it good to be aware of these repeated words (because you can often find more specific alternatives), but I think they can give you some insight into what you are trying to communicate with the work on a thematic level, which can also be helpful in revision.
Concrete craft moves like this one are the bread and butter of Miranda's teaching. Six weeks of them, plus six new pieces of writing, on Zoom Monday evenings starting July 6.
Enroll in Writing with Plants & Animals →Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Miranda Schmidt: I'm always recommending Louise Glück's Wild Iris. I love so many of the poems in this book. The title poem is one of my all time favorites and such a gorgeous poem of grief and death and rebirth. I love how Glück holds connections between plants and people in these poems.
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Miranda Schmidt: "Show don't tell." This can make writers fear description, interiority, reflection and some of the truly wonderful parts of writing.
"'Show don't tell.' This can make writers fear description, interiority, reflection and some of the truly wonderful parts of writing."
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Miranda Schmidt: There really aren't any rules for writing. It's all about what you decide based on what you're trying to do and what you're able to get to work craft-wise.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Miranda Schmidt: I read a lot of Patricia McKillip when I was an adolescent. I loved how she made magic with her sentences.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Miranda Schmidt: I try to spark wonder and create genuinely welcoming and supportive writing spaces.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Miranda Schmidt: I've spent a lot of time doing theatre and still love to dust off my acting skills at readings.
Miranda Schmidt describes their teaching vibe as sparking wonder inside genuinely welcoming writing spaces. That is a rare class, and a rare teacher. Six Monday evenings on Zoom, six new pieces of writing, and a curriculum built around the gardens, pets, animals, trees, and ecosystems that already share our writing rooms, whether we notice them or not. No critique pressure. No formal arc to climb. Just generative practice with a teacher who treats the more-than-human world as collaborator. Bring your notebook, your sleeping cat, the view out your window.
Six weeks. Six new pieces. One class built on noticing. Beginning Monday, July 6, 2026.
Save Your Seat in the Workshop →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
