Get This . . .
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...
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....
Hello
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.
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 teh way he left the Bridgeton, New Jersey area, never to live there again, changing the trajectory of his children and grandchildren. While rsearching this amazing story, I wrote a chapter about smalltime farmers and how they dealt with the industrial agriculture that took over starting int he mid-1800s for a book coming out soon from Rutgers University Press.
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
New routes to new ideas
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...
Dead Fish, Condoms, Brown Foam: Sewage Has Chokehold On Black Rock Harbor
On April 25, 2018, Patrick Clough walked onto a dock at Fayerweather Yacht Club on Black Rock Harbor in western Bridgeport. He looked down. Swirling around the dock was a brown, foamy slick. Women’s sanitary products and other objects floated in it. He...
Testing Poop is the Future
Above, from the Yale study: The red line represents the rise and fall of the COVID-19 outbreaks as detected in New Haven sewage. The darker line, seven days later, represents a similar curve of the outbreak as tracked in human testing. A new study by Yale University...
Long Island Sound to Lobsters: Is This Farewell?
A lobster from southern New England is offered for sale at the Fulton Fish Market in New York City in 1943. Source: Library of Congress archives Twenty years ago, Long Island Sound was home to a thriving fishery of the American lobster. Hundreds of lobster boats...
How Much Plastic is in Your Body? Scientists Turn to Oysters, Mussels for Clues
Marine scientist J. Evan Ward checks on oysters he and his colleagues cultivate at the University of Connecticut. They examine them for the presence of microplastics. Photo by Christine WoodsideJ. Evan Ward knelt on a dock jutting into Eastern Point Bay at the eastern...
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Would you like to submit to Appalachia journal?
Email a short proposal to me: chris@chriswoodside.com.
