Gretchen has taught at the graduate and undergraduate levels for two decades. With writing at the heart of her practice, she has taught in departments of English, Creative Writing, Environmental Humanities, Comparative Media, Art History and Museum Studies, and currently is Senior Lecturer in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin. She has served on the faculties at Georgetown, University of Utah, MIT, Knox College, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Barnard College's Center for Research on Women, and elsewhere, also frequently invited as a visiting writer/artist/scholar to campuses and communities. Her classes often go beyond the classroom, from special collections to landscape designs. Field trips have ranged from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and curated spaces around Boston, to the Smithsonian Museums and National Press Club in Washington, DC, to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (including Nancy Holt’s remote Sun Tunnels) to state parks in the Sierra Nevada of California, and countries throughout Europe engaging exhibits, performances, and cultural arts.

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In 2023-2024, find her workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center on "Relational Ecologies: Writing with a More than Human World" ~ "Writing with Water, Fire, Earth, and Air" and at Oak Spring (read on).

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"Writing the Landscape" is back!

At the Oak Spring Garden Foundation (the former estate of Paul and Rachel Mellon near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia), Gretchen seasonally teaches residential short courses on "Writing the Landscape" (next offerings: April 24-28 and October 16-20, 2023). Beyond environmental writing, the course explores OSGF's celebrated rare books Library, Garden, and Biocultural Conservation Farm on the estate's 700 acres. Guests include OSGF's founding president, Sir Peter Crane (former Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and Dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies). More in 2024, including "Writing the Landscape" and "Literary Ecologies."