It’s always gratifying to be asked to contribute to an anthology, because it means somebody thinks I’m a writer with something to say. Sometimes you really can fool all the editors all the time.
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”Grateful Dead-heading: A Gardener’s Revelation,” an essay in Better with Age: Creativity, Discovery, and Surprise, published in 2020.
“Pinch. Snip. Snap. Severed, spent flowers drop into the compost bucket like guillotined heads into a basket. I pretend they’re my bad habits, bad temper, bad hair. If only it were so easy.”
“In the dusk of my life, I go out on my deck of a […]
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“Pillars of Carbon: National Forests and the Great Appalachian Carbon Commons” is an essay that appeared in Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Antropocene (pp 175-185), Ed by Jessica Cory. West Virginia University Press, 2019.
“Dashes of red paint on occasional trees were easy to miss, and we did. We crossed the border unwittingly, my young husband […]
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“On Not Encountering an Eastern Panther” is an essay that appeared in Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion, Edited by Susan Ewing and Elizabeth Grossman, Sasquatch Books, 1999
“Sometimes it seems that I am the only person I know who hasn’t seen a panther in the mountains of western Virginia, where I live. Reports come in from […]
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“Communities in Crisis” is an essay that appeared in An Appalachian Tragedy: Air Pollution and Tree Death in the Eastern Forests of North America, Ed by Harvard Ayers, Jenny Hager, and Charles E. Litter with photographs by Jenny Hager. Sierra Club Books, 1998.
The assignment to write a biogeochemical essay that would entice people to read it was a tough one. Yet the thought of the widespread distribution that a Sierra Club book […]