I am pleased to say that this summer I'll be joining a flock of writers whose work variously engages with the “environment,” place, and ecology at the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference at the Bread Loaf Campus of Middlebury College in Ripton, VT, from June 3-9.
It’s an honor to be accepted to any Bread Loaf conference, but I'm especially excited for this one and the opportunity to enter into conversations with other writers trying to make sense of the more-than-human world. And, judging by the pictures online, it should be a really beautiful place to spend a week in June. I'm especially looking forward to visiting Robert Frost’s writing cabin.
I’m also particularly excited for the incentive to dip back into my Havening manuscript that I started while in the MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State -- a lyrical nonfiction exploration of the life and work of Liberty Hyde Bailey, the environmental crises that he grappled with compared with those we face today, and the small hometown of South Haven, MI that he and I shared some 130 years apart. My application submission was an excerpt from that larger project, which I hope to return to this summer. Outside of the Bread Loaf week this June, this summer I'll mostly be living in a small cottage on Lake Cayuga outside of Ithaca, New York, doing dissertation research in the Bailey Papers at Cornell University and working on the first chapter of the dissertation -- and perhaps, with the added energy from Bread Loaf, working on the rewrite of Havening that I've been contemplating for the past few years...