Ginger Strand, a former fellow at the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton, is the author of the novel Flight and the non-fiction work Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power and Lies. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Harper’s, The Believer (“Selling Sex in Honeymoon Heaven”), The Iowa Review and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. We recently spoke with Strand about the writing life and her upcoming non-fiction workshop at the Y, Place and Prose: Writing Nature, Writing Culture (beginning March 8).

When, and how, did you start writing?
Like a lot of writers, I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t writing--keeping journals, starting novels, scribbling reams of (bad) poetry . . . I began to take my writing seriously when, because of the work I was doing at the time, I stopped doing it. The unhappiness that resulted told me something about myself. I re-organized my life so I could write, began taking evening classes, and started to take myself seriously as a writer. 

What is your writing routine? Do you write every day?
I do write every day, but that doesn’t always mean taking pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard.) It can also mean traveling somewhere to attend a conference, conducting interviews by phone or in person, or doing research at an archive. Sometimes it means rambling around the city and just thinking hard about something. 

When, and how, did you become interested in the environment, and in the idea of “place” in writing?
I have always been passionate about the environment--even though I’m not much of a nature girl. And place has always affected me strongly; my first book, a novel, was a portrait of place as well as of people.  But I didn’t think of myself as an environmental writer, really, until Orion magazine called me up and asked if I would write for them. I said “I’m not a nature writer,” and they said “Yeah, but you’re an environmental writer.” I thought “Hmmmm, I guess they’re right!”

What made you want to offer a nonfiction writing workshop on place and prose? What can students expect from the workshop?
Just about any piece of writing is in part about place. And yet, I think we so often relegate place to the role of window-dressing--it’s the setting where the characters live and the action happens. To me, place is also a character. It’s part of the human characters and it’s part of the action. So any piece of writing can benefit from having the writer think hard about place, so she can bring it to life with just as much passion as she uses bringing characters to life. I thought it would be fun to try to work together to do that. I like to look at examples of really good writing—work by John McPhee, Annie Dillard and Mike Davis, for example--but in the end, it’s workshopping student work that’s the most helpful thing. To take a piece of writing and say “Okay, this is what the author is trying to do. Let’s see if we can help make it even better.”