Tag Archives: Lesley Evans Ogden

Sign up for Nature Writing in the Great Bear Rainforest, a four day programme from May 31 – June 4, 2026

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h/t to Science Media Centre of Canada’s September 2, 2025 science notice for this notice about an exciting immersive writing programme. It’s pricey but you may find it worthwhile. Here’s a video (embedded on spiritbear.com) featuring a clip from the Great Bear Rainforest IMAX Film courtesy of Spirit Bear Lodge and filmmaker Ian McAllister,

The programme for writers in the Great Bear Rainforest was developed by Lesley Evans Ogden, Canadian science journalist. From her eponymous website, Note: I have reorganized the order of the information on the website,

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Is this workshop for me?

This is an experience designed for: 

·       new or established writers interested in publishing science and nature writing in magazines, newspapers, blogs or a book

·       museum staff wanting to improve science communication

·       professors wanting to improve public engagement

·       travel writers looking to expand potential markets into eco and nature writing

·       hobbyists writing for the pure joy of writing

Whether you’re a hobbyist, aspiring writer, journalist, travel writer, museum curator, public information officer, blogger or scientist, you will find your days at comfortable and welcoming Great Bear Lodge thought-provoking, enlightening and inspirational. Participants will deepen their connection to nature while exploring how to share that connection with others through narrative non-fiction writing.

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Your coach [emphasis mine] in this spectacular wild environment will be internationally acclaimed science journalist, author and workshop leader Lesley Evans Ogden [emphasis mine]. Lesley’s nature writing, photography and documentary work have been published and broadcast by top outlets for science and nature communication, including the New York Times, CBC, BBC, Scientific American, New Scientist, Science, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Nature, and many others.

An award-winning writer and teacher, Lesley has previously led and spoken at highly regarded workshops for universities, colleges and organizations including the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Mount Allison University, the National Association of Science Writers (US), COMPASS, and the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada.

Your writing opportunities will be drawn from fresh field observations and individual passion projects. Nature Writing in the Great Bear Rain Forest will be a unique opportunity to learn from small group and individualized coaching and mentorship.

We will spend time daily in remote and beautiful Smith Inlet, using observations made in this exceptional natural environment to generate new writing. Each day at the lodge will include morning and evening wildlife tours by boat, accompanied by afternoon and evening writing sessions for coaching, focused instruction and feedback..

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What’s included in your 4-day workshop experience

  • Daily morning and evening wildlife tours with wildlife guides and writing coach
  • Small group sessions that include reading and supportive feedback for works in progress
  • Independent writing time
  • Group and instructor feedback on written work in progress
  • Two hours of in-person individualized writing coaching from Lesley
  • Final reading by participants to each other and lodge staff
  • Session on pitching and publishing
  • One hour of post-workshop online mentoring with Lesley

This unique experience is an ecotour and writing workshop rolled into one, designed to be flexible to a range of participant needs and levels of experience.

At the end of this short course, you will come away with new skills and a new network — a supportive team of fellow nature writers.

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Dates:  May 31 – June 4, 2026

Level:  All Levels

Cost: $5000 CDN per participant

What does the cost include?

  • Two boat-based nature viewing sessions per day, including possible sightings of grizzly bears, bald eagles, seals, and whales, accompanied by lodge wildlife guides and Lesley.
  • Accommodation for 3 nights in a private room at the Great Bear Lodge with ensuite shower
  • Wilderness-gourmet meals including wine, beer and a selection of beverages
  • Interpretive discussion and welcome orientation for wildlife viewing
  • Daily group and individually-tailored nature writing instruction in the field and at the lodge to work fresh nature observations into polished prose
  • Individually tailored coaching and feedback
  • Pitching and publishing skills
  • Post-workshop mentorship and networking
  • Return seaplane flight from Port Hardy to Great Bear Lodge
  • Binoculars, rain gear and rubber boots, if required
  • Final night at the Kwa’lilas Hotel in Port Hardy (group dinner at participant expense)
  • Workshop tuition, including one hour follow up mentorship session online after completion

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Preliminary Schedule

Day 1: Arrival by wilderness float plane late afternoon (departure from Port Hardy scheduled for 3pm), settle in, evening field trip, dinner, drinks and introductory session

Day 2: Yoga/aerobics on the dock (optional), breakfast, morning boat expedition, lunch, group writing instruction, individual writing time, dinner, evening safari, group readings of work in progress with drinks & dessert

Day 3: Yoga/aerobics on the dock (optional), breakfast, morning boat expedition, lunch, group writing instruction, individual writing time, one-on-one coaching sessions with Lesley, dinner and readings, evening expedition, individual writing time.

Day 4: Breakfast, morning expedition, pitching and publishing session, lunch, readings, wrap up, departure by float plane, dinner and wrap up at Kwa’lilas Hotel in Port Hardy.

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Availability:

9 SPACES AVAILABLE

(Maximum group size 9)

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Sign up
Questions?

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This seems to be a ‘first come, first served’ situation rather than a competitive one. One last comment, May 31 – June 4, 2025 is a five day* period. You may want to check Ogden’s eponymous website to find whatever I missed.

*ETA September 3, 2025 at 4:15 pm PT: Lesley Ogden Evans very kindly confirmed that day 5 is a travel day.

Opening it all up (open software, Nature, and Naked Science)

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I’m coming back to the ‘open access’ well this week since there’ve been a few new developments since my massive May 28, 2012 posting on the topic.

A June 5, 2012 posting by Glyn Moody at the Techdirt website brought yet another aspect of ‘open access’ to my attention,

Computers need software, and some of that software will be specially written or adapted from existing code to meet the particular needs of the scientists’ work. This makes computer software a vital component of the scientific process. It also means that being able to check that code for errors is as important as being able to check the rest of the experiment’s methodology. And yet very rarely can other scientists do that, because the code employed is not made available.

That’s right,  there’s open access scientific software.

Meanwhile over at the Guardian newspaper website, Paul Campbell, Nature journal’s editor-in-chief,  notes that open access to research is inevitable in a June 8, 2012 article by Alok Jha,

Open access to scientific research articles will “happen in the long run”, according to the editor-in-chief of Nature, one of the world’s premier scientific journals.

Philip Campbell said that the experience for readers and researchers of having research freely available is “very compelling”. But other academic publishers said that any large-scale transition to making research freely available had to take into account the value and investments they added to the scientific process.

“My personal belief is that that’s what’s going to happen in the long run,” said Campbell. However, he added that the case for open access was stronger for some disciplines, such as climate research, than others.

Campbell was speaking at a briefing hosted by the Science Media Centre.  Interestingly, ScienceOnline Vancouver’s upcoming (June 12, 2012, 6:30 pm mingling starts, 7-9 pm PDT for the panel discussion) meeting about open access (titled, Naked Science; Excuse me: your science is showing) features a speaker from Canada’s Science Media Centre (from the event page),

  1. Heather Piwowar is a postdoc with Duke University and the Dept of Zoology at UBC.  She’s a researcher on the NSF-funded DataONE and Dryad projects, studying data.  Specifically, how, when, and why do scientists publicly archive the datasets they collect?  When do they reuse the data of others?  What related policies and tools would help facilitate more efficient and effective use of data resources?  Heather is also a co-founder of total-impact, a web application that reveals traditional and non-traditional impact metrics of scholarly articles, datasets, software, slides, and blog posts.
  2. Heather Morrison is a Vancouver-based, well-known international open access advocate and practitioner of open scholarship, through her blogs The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com and her dissertation-blog http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
  3. Lesley Evans Ogden is a freelance science journalist and the Vancouver media officer for the Science Media Centre of Canada. In the capacity of freelance journalist, she is a contributing science writer at Natural History magazine, and has written for a variety of publications including YES Mag, Scientific American (online), The Guardian, Canadian Running, and Bioscience. She has a PhD in wildlife ecology, and spent more than a decade slogging through mud and climbing mountains to study the breeding and winter ecology of migratory birds. She is also an alumni of the Science Communications program at the Banff Centre. (She will be speaking in the capacity of freelance journalist).
  4. Joy Kirchner is the Scholarly Communications Coordinator at University of British Columbia where she heads the University’s developing Copyright office in addition to the Scholarly Communications office based in the Library. Her role involves coordinating the University’s copyright education services, identifying recommended and sustainable service models to support scholarly communication activities on the campus and coordinating formalized discussion and education of these issues with faculty, students, research and publishing constituencies on the UBC campus. Joy has also been instrumental in working with faculty to host their open access journals through the Library’s open access journal hosting program; she was involved in the implementation and content recruitment of the Library’s open access  institutional repository, and she was instrumental in establishing the Provost’s Scholarly Communications Steering Committee and associated working groups where she sits as a key member of the Committee looking into an open access position at UBC amongst other things..  Joy is also chair of UBC’s Copyright Advisory Committee and working groups. She is also a faculty member with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) / Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Institute for Scholarly Communication, she assists with the coordination and program development of ACRL’s much lauded Scholarly Communications Road Show program, she is a Visiting Program Officer with ACRL in support of their scholarly communications programs, and she is a Fellow with ARL’s Research Library Leadership Fellows executive program (RLLF). Previous positions includes Librarian, for Collections, Licensing & Digital Scholarship (UBC), Electronic Resources Coordinator (Columbia Univ.), Medical & Allied Health Librarian and Science & Engineering Librarian. She holds a BA and an MLIS from the University of British Columbia.

I’m starting to get the impression that there is a concerted communications effort taking place. Between this listing and the one in my May 28, 2012 posting, there are just too many articles and events occurring to be purely chance.