A different kind of summer escape read + call for essays at The Bucket

Woodswoman, Anne LaBastille

Earlier this week a well-meaning aunt asked me the status of my novel-in-progress. I’m in the middle. I’m trying to increase the pace, raise the stakes, decrease repetition and stage direction in my dialogue tags. I chewed on possible answers as I went about my day. Finally, ankle deep in art supplies and recycled gift wrap the response came to me. I’m in the “clean-my-office-closet” stage of revision.

Woodswoman

Anne LaBastille

A standout Covid-times discovery was the work of Anne LaBastille. In addition to academic papers in ecology, publications in wildlife magazines, her Woodswoman series is four short memoirs about building her own cabin in the Adirondacks in the mid 1960’s, then building a more remote cabin, and her life (mostly) alone in the woods.

My very favorite thing about Anne LaBastille is that she wasn’t a perfectionist. She was competent and thorough, but she didn’t expect herself to know everything all the time. My family enjoys/tolerates-my-enjoyment-of camping. Despite a checklist refined over many years, there’s always something that would have been nice to have that wasn’t on the list. In Book II of the Woodswoman series LaBastille says she adjusted her own checklist after every camping trip. In another instance she used her snowmobile to rescue a lakeside neighbor who’d injured himself doing some woodsperson task. With no trace of apology she wrote of racing him toward the road, “I never learned first aid!” Truly, this sentence warms my heart.

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Two pretty great Substack posts caught my attention last week:

Author

Christie Tate

wrote In Praise of Low-key Recommendations. I frequently give recommendations at volume level 10. Her essay reminds me other levels are not only valid, but perhaps more approachable to the receiver. This is the spirit in which I offer Woodswoman. Maybe it’s for you in this season of your reading life. Maybe it’s not. They were just the thing for me when I them.

Phyllis Capanna

wrote a beautiful piece reminding each of us that we enough, as we are, right now (just as Anne LaBastille was enough despite not knowing first aid). I appreciated this so much that I distributed it beyond the Substack ecosystem.

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Writers: call for essays!

I’m in a co-writing group with Morgan Baker, Managing Editor of The Bucket and author of Emptying the Nest. The Bucket is on the search for your pieces! Specifically, they’re interested in “short(ish) (500 - 1000 word) essays on DBRs - otherwise known as Death Bed Regrets. What do you hope to do to avoid one, what have you done - it doesn’t have to be a bucket list thing - more some sort of emotional journey.” The Bucket also publish reported pieces, if that ’s your thing. If your eyeballs are within reach of this post, I have strong hunch this could be you. If you have half an essay floating around you computer, tidy it up and submit to The Bucket! You’d be in good company - great writing over there.

One more thing:

My grandmother recently mailed some books to my kids. She included this brochure of the Eudora Welty House. She doesn’t know how the brochure came into her possession, but I should enjoy it. This act - that she didn’t toss it, but made sure that someone who might have an interest in an otherwise unexplained brochure about a museum in Mississippi received it - this makes me feel like I am the way I am because of the people who came before me.

Happy reading!

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Notes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_LaBastille

https://bookshop.org/p/books/woodswoman-young-ecologist-meets-challenge-living-alone-adirondack-wilderness-anne-labastille/11586356?aid=88635&ean=9780140153347&listref=books-are-my-love-language

https://thebucket.com/columns/call-for-submissions/