Autumn Invitations
Upcoming book events, and a reading group
The changing season is upon us. My child started back to school (at a new school!) this week, and we’ve been having a bit of a tease for fall weather here in the piedmont of North Carolina: cooler mornings and a few days in the 70s, a welcome break from the intense heat and humidity and mosquitoes. I hope that wherever you are on this planet, you’re finding moments of rest, gratitude, and beauty.
I’ve been quieter on Substack this summer, and there’s much I want to share with you here when the time is right. For example, I’m gathering my thoughts on a five-day artist residency I attended in July with the NC Climate Justice Collective, and I just completed my training as a facilitator for the Climate Wayfinding program through the All We Can Save Project. Both of these opportunities will continue to inform our offerings through The School for Living Futures as well as my writing and teaching, including a new book project that I have percolating.
Meanwhile, as I prepare to leave town next week for the first jaunt of a fall book tour for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, I wanted to extend a couple of invitations to you beautiful people for ways to stay connected this season.
First, please come out to one of my book events if I’m coming through your area! I would be so happy to see you. Here’s the current schedule of where I’ll be:
09/04: Richmond, IN ⋆ Indiana U. East ⋆ 4:30p
09/05: Cincinnati, OH ⋆ U. of Cincinnati with Lily Meyer ⋆ 5:30p
09/06: Columbus, OH ⋆ Ohio State U. ⋆ 4:00p
09/12: Greensboro, NC ⋆ UNC Greensboro with Travis Sharp ⋆ 5:00p
09/20-1: Asheville, NC ⋆ Punch Bucket Lit. Fest. (Multiple events, See festival schedule)
09/27-8: Seattle, WA ⋆ Fall Convergence on Poetics (Multiple events, 2024 schedule forthcoming)
10/17: Raleigh, NC ⋆ Birdland Gallery with Sarah Minor ⋆ 7:00p
11/09: Bethesda, MD ⋆ Bethesda Writers Center with Tyler Mills and Jessica Johnson ⋆ 6:30p
11/10: Washington DC ⋆ Bridge Street Books with Tyler Mills and Jessica Johnson ⋆ 8:00p
Secondly, my sister Krista and I are trying something new this fall with the School for Living Futures, and I want to invite all of you here to participate. We’re organizing a small reading group around Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira that will be meeting bi-monthly this fall, but we’d love to have a wider circle of folks who are reading along with us either independently or by forming your own satellite pairs or groups with friends.
This book is a gem, and I encourage anyone out there who hasn’t read it yet (or who wants to read it again in community) to find a copy. My friend Saskia Cornes describes it well as “one part Indigenous and Educational studies approaches to climate change, one part work book, and one part manifesto.” It’s a transformative text.
To keep us all connected while we think and feel our way through the book, we’re sharing our reading schedule, and have also created an online space where participants can share reflections, responses, and related resources as we go. If you’d like to be added to this online space (which comprises a Google Classroom and a “Running Archive” document, send me a message on here or by email, and I’ll add you.
I hope to see many of you very soon, either at a book event, on the reading group platform, over a cup of tea, or elsewhere. Perhaps I’ll be walking down a forest trail or sidewalk somewhere and I’ll look up, and there you’ll be.