The World of Nature in Literature

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14
Tom Brown, The Tracker
Tom Brown is revered for what he is able to teach about the spirit and for his ability to be completely at home in the natural world. He will read from his memoir, The Tracker, about his early education in the New Jersey Pine Barrens under the tutelage of Stalking Wolf, a Lipan Apache elder. As a young boy, Brown learned how to track, stalk and survive in the wilderness for days on end. He trained himself not to feel the cold and to be so still in the long grass that the wild bucks stepped casually over him as they would step over a fallen log. Brown is the author of The Way of the Scout and many field guides. He is the founder of the Tracking, Nature and Wilderness Survival School in New Jersey. Come early for a Wildlife Walk with an experienced tracker. Meet at Wave Hill House, 11AM.

SUNDAY, January 11
Kathy Garlick and Peggy Ann Tartt
Although Garlick and Tartt’s books, The Listening World and Among Bones are quite different from each  other, their poems reflect the absolute originality and intensity that comes from  immersion in the natural world. Garlick has received a Ford Foundation Fellowship and Tartt has been a Pushcart Press nominee; their poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, Field, African American Review and Prairie Schooner.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 29
Jack Hitt and Nalini Nadkarni
Jack Hitt’s “A Gospel According to the Earth” (Harper’s) is a brilliant essay about the contemporary parables created by the new eco-faith and the deep connections between biblical religion and envi-ronmentalism. “Treetop Barbie” is the brainchild of Nalini Nadkarni, a highly respected canopy ecologist. With funding from a Guggenheim, she has invented unique ways to connect us to her scientific work, speaking at  churches and temples on “Trees and Spirituality” as part of her outreach.

SUNDAY, MARCH 21
Sue Halpern and Bill McKibben
Halpern’s novel, The Book of Hard Things, is set in the Adirondack Mountains. Her non-fiction books are Four Wings and a Prayer, about Monarch butterfly migrations, and Migrations to Solitude. Bill McKibben’s Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age is a sequel to his chilling The End of Nature. Enough is the point at which we step back from crossing the line in human genetic exploration, the moment where we wake from our
sleepwalk toward the future and realize we are in danger of losing the meaning of what it is to be human.

2003-2004 Hearthside Readings is generously supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts—a state agency, and by the Axe-Houghton Foundation. Sustaining support for Wave Hill is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.