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Launch party on September 10 at Breakwater Books. Reading September 13 at the Norwich Bookstore in Vermont
Breakwater Books will host a launch party on Sunday, September 10 at 5 p.m. at their store at 18 Whitfield Street in Guilford, Connecticut. Thank you, Breakwater! The Norwich Bookstore will host my next reading and talk on September 13 starting at 7...
Health reporting that made a difference
Over the past several years, I wrote environmental health stories for the Connecticut Health Investigative Team. C-hit.org's founder and editor Lynne Delucia decided to stop publishing new material as 2022 came to a close. Delucia edited and inspired journalists at...
Morning person? No. Night owl.
This morning, I tried solving the daily Wordle puzzle before I got out of bed. It took me three times as long, and I almost didn't get it. I actually had predicted this might be true. I wake up slowly. My brain just seems less flexible until a few hours after I wake...
Writing below a mountain
A birch and a pine grow next to each other below Mount Cardigan, Alexandria, New Hampshire. I just returned from leading a writing workshop for the Appalachian Mountain Club. The AMC and I began Writing from the Mountains in 2016. The year before, we had brainstormed...
New fiction in next year’s Running Wild Press Anthology
My short story, "Pumping Station Road," about a trail runner whose ambition to run the entire width of Connecticut from east to west causes havoc with people he loves, will appear in the seventh Running Wild Press Anthology of Stories coming out in October 2023 from...
News
Welcome! I am a writer, editor, and college lecturer based in New England. I explore people’s relationship to their landscapes. I hope you will stay here a while and get to know my work.
My new book Going Over the Mountain traces my evolution as a wilderness trekker. I followed others. I tried to teach my daughters resilience. I went alone. I came back to community. It comes out in September from Appalachian Mountain Club Books. Preorder it here.
I am doing some writing about the hard lives of New Jersey farmers in the twentieth century. I wrote a chapter in a book for Rutgers University Press (coming out soon) about New Jersey’s environmental past.
I am the editor-in-chief of Appalachia journal (submit button at the bottom of the page).
I teach journalism history at the University of Connecticut.
Libertarians on the Prairie tells how a secret collaboration on the Little House books reshaped the nineteenth-century American frontier story into a series of heroic tales that rebutted the policies of the New Deal. Libertarians on the Prairie is available in hardback and a paperback edition with a Foreword by Stephen Heuser. Order one today.
Going back in time a bit: I appeared in Don Bernier’s 2005 film, “In a Nutshell,” about a brilliant, eccentric artist who found herself homeless in her 90s. A clip here.
Book Excerpts
Libertarians on the Prairie
by Chris Woodside read more
Going Over the Mountain
As a kid, I was a follower. I rarely had a sense of where I was on a trail except to tag along and for years looked for agency in the wrong places, like dance class. Then, in my early twenties I began my outdoors journey in earnest, soon falling in love with the...
Strangers Helping in a Most Respectful Way
Wild ponies in the Grayson Highlands, southern Virginia. One hot July afternoon earlier this summer, my husband Nat and I were huffing up the Marlborough Trail on Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire. I spotted four men above me, heading down. I pulled myself...
A Deadly Mix for Boaters: Distractions, Alcohol and No Life Jacket
On a warm, slightly overcast Sunday afternoon last August 8, boaters near the Salmon River boat launch on the Connecticut River in East Haddam noticed a personal watercraft drifting without a rider. Less than an hour later, state environmental police recovered a man’s...
The Myth of American Conservatism
Laura Ingalls Wilder was an American farmer and small-town farm journalist who rarely got involved in 20th-century politics. She was not an activist for the vote and only entered in politics in old age, when she ran for a paid local office — and lost. And yet for...
Climate-change Prep Has Missed the LGBTQ Community
When it comes to environmental vulnerability, one group of people society often marginalizes has started to act up in Connecticut. Activists say one major category is missing when policymakers look at climate change preparation: the lesbian, gay, bisexual,...
