Cover of Woodsqueer by Gretchen Legler
Please join Print: A Bookstore and the MWPA as we host a virtual conversation between Gretchen Legler and Philip Francis.
"Woodsqueer" is sometimes used to describe the mindset of a person who has taken to the wild for an extended period of time. Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences intentionally focusing on not just making a living but making a life--in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine.
American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams says, "Legler is a seeker. This book is more than a 'back to the land' memoir; it is a spiritual autobiography of a women in relationship with the earth in all its power."
To order Woodsqueer from Print Bookstore, please go here.
For the Zoom link to this event, please head over to the event page on Print’s website by clicking on the button below.
Gretchen Legler is the author of On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica and All The Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman's Notebook, which received two Pushcart Prizes (reissued by Trinity University Press). She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. She lives in Farmington with her partner, Ruth.
Philip Francis, PhD Harvard University, grew up on a boat yard in Georgetown Maine. He learned to philosophize in that salty mix of lobstermen pragmatists and back to the lander idealists. After painting the bottom of many a boat, he took his questions on the road: to liberation theology base camps in Nicaragua, ashrams in India and monasteries in Greece. He settled down at Harvard Divinity School where he completed his doctoral work in religion and aesthetics. Before coming to University of Maine Farmington, he taught at Carleton College and Manhattan College. In 2016, he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, his book, When Art Disrupts Religion: Aesthetic Experience and the Evangelical Mind, was published by Oxford University Press.