Get This . . .

Morning person? No. Night owl.

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...

read more
Writing below a mountain

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...

read more
Update, early spring 2022

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....

read more

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 came out in September 2023 from Appalachian Mountain Club Books. Order one direct from the publisher 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.

 

 

Writing Workshops

Writing from Nature

New Wilderness Voices

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...

read more
My Secret Ledge

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...

read more

Sign up for my email newsletter.

Would you like to submit to Appalachia journal?

Would you like to order Going Over the Mountain?