Take a socially-distant walk up Scafell Pike — England’s tallest mountain — with writer, historian, teacher, and landscape designer, Kathryn Aalto. Our episode begins with Aalto reading her opening essay on Dorothy Wordsworth from her new book, Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World (Timber Press, June 2020). Aalto then joins us for teatime from her home in Devon, England to share insights into what inspired her to write the book, the research process, and the women she selected to be profiled in the book. From Mary Oliver to Elizabeth Rush, she sheds new light on women’s evolving role in the canon of nature writers.
Who are the pioneering and imaginative women who dared … to take simple walks without the chaperone of men? To pick up a pen and write under their own names? To record their protests, poetry, and prose? To change history? In Writing Wild, Kathryn Aalto lyrically profiles 25 women, both historical and current, whose influential nature writing has deepened our connection to and understanding of the natural world.
Part travel essay, literary biography, and cultural history Writing Wild ventures into the landscapes and lives of extraordinary writers and encourages a new generation of women to pick up their pens, head outdoors, and start writing wild.
In addition to Writing Wild, Aalto is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood (2015) and Nature and Human Intervention (2011). Her essays have appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Buzzfeed, Resurgence, the Ecologist, and more. She is currently working on her fourth book. You can learn more at https://www.kathrynaalto.com.
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