Skip to main content

About

Rooted firmly in love, trust, respect, and craft, our roles are interchangeable: sometimes creator, critic, instructor, student, friend. Our boundaries are fluid, creating a space that allows for a generative experience, both personally and creatively. Seen by each other, we become visible. Listened to, we begin to take up space. Collectively, we will each other to be known so that we may write from a place of presence, authority, and voice.

What began during the global pandemic of 2020 as an attempt to translate a week-long residency at Arts Letters & Numbers into a virtual experience with the hope of facilitating the same emotional and creative engagement of a shared physical space, The Earth Of quickly became an investigation into what might be possible when artists look beyond the veneer of separation and reconsider the barriers between us. Since its inception, The Earth Of has continued to grow into something more than the sum of its parts through frequent programs and residencies at Arts Letters & Numbers and the incredible support, collaboration, and engagement of its student-community.

Instructors

Andrew and Ginger met in grad school in 2011 and have since been constant collaborators. Their primary goal with The Earth Of is to give other creators access to a shared space with the same love, acceptance, freedom, and support that they created for and with each other. They realized over the years how rare this kind of space is and how life changing it can potentially be when people are given access to it.

Learn More
“

Ginger and Andrew have created something that’s been exactly what I’ve needed. A class outside of an institution. A clear structure while also being flexible and open. And a group of people I know I can turn to at any time with creative work. They put so much care into making a place that nurtures all of our creative lives, and it’s always a comfort to be able to look forward to the next iteration.

Evan Burgess
“

The Earth Of is interdisciplinary, non-institutional, literate, and humane. Is it a workshop or a seminar, a course or a community? It’s all of those and something else. The Earth Of keeps evolving. It’s rigorously grounded and radically open. It’s historically aware, socially inquisitive, queer, gentle, well connected, and ready to be your new friend.

Christine Lorenz
“

The two years (and two publications) I spent with The Earth Of were a place of community, of processing the chaos and growth of our times, and of play and experimentation. I can't thank Ginger and Andrew enough. What they created was medicinal on many layers.

Monica Lacey
“

The Earth Of is a collaborative, supportive, and expansive community where you are encouraged to test the edges of thought and creativity. The workshop material is well planned to support discussion and the participants work. Always a delight to engage in this space.

Tamara Fox
“

Life itself can be understood as the search for our stories, as the enactment of our stories, as the endless hope of evidence that we exist, and the craft of finding ourselves in the nuance of our individual voice within our shared stories. It is in this deep structural sense that I celebrate our Arts Letters and Numbers writing workshops directed by Ginger Teppner and Andrew Helton. These workshops create a space for a remarkable gathering of writers to explore their voices, to expand the individual poetic imagination and make space for our shared stories. Together they build us, and our earth of, out of words and dreams. I am profoundly grateful to Ginger and Andrew for creating the atmospheres within which everyone discovers such depth and voice and vision and create gifts to us all and to the earth itself.

David Gersten
“

I never would have imagined that the conversations between us would become as deep as they did, that a book would be inspired by the process, and that my poems would be midwifed by so many helpful fellow creatives.

Nancy Ring