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Beginning my visiting professor year at UConn
Teaching has risen to the top of my list. I am a visiting assistant professor in journalism at the University of Connecticut this year. I will be teaching environmental journalism, the history of journalism in America ("The Press in America"), and two newswriting labs...
Appalachia’s Accidents report here. Click on link at the bottom.
Accidents Summer Fall 2020 Appalachia Journal
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...
Manage public outdoor spaces the way we manage grocery stores: like essential spaces that should never close
People need to get outside, breathe fresh air, move around, and fix their eyes on some actual distant shore. The coronavirus pandemic is rising toward its peak in the Northeast. Cities, towns, states, and the federal government are closing access to public parks...
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
Libertarians on the Prairie
by Chris Woodside read more
No Limits But the Sky
Cover The Best Mountaineering Stories from Appalachia Journal 2014, Appalachian Mountain Club Books This anthology collects the most riveting, real-life adventure stories from America's oldest mountaineering and conservation journal, Appalachia. Each of these essays,...
Fear of rattlesnakes
Biologist Tom Tyning scrambles up a ledge in Massachusetts, looking for rattlesnakes he will study in his lab and then return to the wild. The snakes are rare because poachers steal them and sell them illegally. (Photo by Christine Woodside) From Appalachia...
Mold concerns rise with the sea level
I wrote this for the Connecticut Health Investigative Team. See http://c-hit.org/2018/07/24/mold-concerns-rise-with-sea-level/
Encounter with a hare
Lepus americanus. Photo by Walter Siegmund. Past midnight I awakened and crept behind the mountain shelter, over dry leaves behind the back wall. Wind rustled from the open ridge of Vermont’s Mount Tom toward the spruces. I wore my improvised headlamp, a flashlight on...
Trail of Memories
Heading up the Undermountain Trail with Talley. Photo by Julie Bidwell Yankee Magazine, March 2017 One bright Monday afternoon, I step onto the Undermountain Trail below Bear Mountain, in northwest Connecticut. I climb east. The trail rolls mostly straight up, but...
