Get This . . .
New fiction by me in 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 next Running Wild Press anthology, coming out in October from this...
Update, early spring 2022
Above: Annie Gribbins with some of her husband's emergency rescue gear, which has inspired us to think of new coping strategies as the pandemic winds down. My sister Anne Woodside Gribbins and I have published a new essay about coping strategies in the pandemic age....
Two weeks ago, as thin ice layers melted on the newly fallen leaves in New Hampshire's Crawford Notch, I said goodbye to a group of writers who'd spent the weekend with me for another Writing from the Mountains. These creatives were at varying stages of ideas and...
Symbols in a personal history
The forgotten Swiss Army knife is a character in my next book. I am writing a wilderness memoir. Appalachian Mountain Club Books will publish this book in a year. Writing personal history means I must do research on my own life. This story involves my two daughters,...
From endurance to hope
The last year and a half felt a little like an endurance race without the trail. Mentally I knew how to hold on and keep going, but physically, between the masks and atrial fibrillation—a common affliction of lifelong athletes (and a lot of other people) but which...
News
Christine Woodside is a writer from Connecticut who explores people’s relationship to their landscapes.
Her next book is a memoir of taking herself and her young daughters into wild places and how that completely changed her and maybe them. It comes out next year from Appalachian Mountain Club Books.
She always wondered about her grandfather who decided to leave farming after his family had done it for 200 years. So she’s writing a chapter for a new book about New Jersey’s environmental past. It will explore struggles of small farmers in southern New Jersey at the dawn of the industrial age.
She edits Appalachia journal (submit button at the bottom of the page).
Chris teaches at the University of Connecticut. She writes for online and print magazines and journals.
Libertarians on the Prairie, Chris’s book about the lives and collaboration of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, has established itself in scholarship of the mysterious and gripping “Little House” books. She talks about limited government and the Little House books in this episode of Sean Braswell’s podcast, “Flashback.” 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: Chris appears throughout Don Bernier’s 2005 film, “In a Nutshell,” about a brilliant, eccentric artist who found herself homeless in her 90s. A clip here.
Writing Workshops
Chris’s next writing workshop is Writing from the Mountains for the Appalachian Mountain Club, October 28-30 at Cardigan Lodge in Alexandria, New Hampshire.
Libertarians on the Prairie
by Chris Woodside read more
New Wilderness Voices
Collected Essays from the Waterman Fund Contest Christine Woodside, editor; Amy Seidl, foreword A literary celebration of the Northeast’s wild places Guy and Laura Waterman spent a lifetime reflecting on and writing about the mountains of the Northeast. The Waterman...
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,...
My Secret Ledge
Photo of the ledge by Christopher Zajac for Estuary magazine. When I go there now, two or three times every week, I walk to the end of one road and trudge up a broken old woods road into the state forest. I step over ruts, where puddles linger long and narrow in dirt...
