Saturday, February 24, 3-4PM
$15 ($12 for Members)
Join East End farmer and author, Scott Chaskey, in conversation with writer Evan Harris, as they discuss his book Soil and Spirit, our reciprocal relationship with land and species, and share poetry. Soil and Spirit is filled with lively essays exploring Scott’s evolving perspective as a farmer and poet, describing his experiences in environments close to home and as far flung as Ireland, China and New Mexico.
“Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”–words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness, “Scott both expands our horizons and deepens our contemplative capacities with the astonishing connections he makes between soil, soul, and sustenance in these challenging and eloquent essays…” — Gary Paul Nabhan
This workshop is open to learners of all experiences & interest levels, and programmed in relation to the current exhibition, Student Art Festival: Eco vs Ego.
ABOUT SCOTT CHASKEY’s book SOIL and SPIRIT
As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.
Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective—as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.
Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.
https://milkweed.org/book/soil-and-spirit
SOIL AND SPIRIT WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT THE PROGRAM.
...
SOIL AND SPIRIT book cover courtesy of Milkweed Editions.
EVENT SPONSORS
THEATER PROGRAMMING IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE SCHAFFNER FAMILY FOUNDATION AND FUNDING FROM THE MELVILLE STRAUS FAMILY ENDOWMENT. MUSIC PROGRAMMING IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE ELLEN AND JAMES S. MARCUS ENDOWMENT FOR MUSICAL PROGRAMMING.
