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 wilderness memoir Going Over the Mountain traces my evolution as a mountain trekker. I followed others. I tried to teach my daughters resilience. I went alone. I came back to community. It came out in September 2023 from Appalachian Mountain Club Books. Order a copy here from the distributor. 

My next book explores my farmer ancesters in New Jersey. My grandfather decided he didn’t want to be a farmer and at age 18 with a new wife and baby on the way he left the Bridgeton, New Jersey area, never to live there again, changing the trajectory of his children and grandchildren. 

Asking why he left, I encountered the story of my great-grandfather, Furman Woodside, who stayed. I wrote a chapter about the farmers of my great-grandfather’s time in this new book out from Rutgers University Press.

I am soon to end my 20-year stint as 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. 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.