The Arts

Digging deep

Brooks Memorial Library presents reading and discussion series on farms, gardens

BRATTLEBORO—Beginning Wednesday, Aug. 29 at 7 p.m., Brooks Memorial Library will present a reading and discussion series on farms and gardens.

Join the conversation with your neighbors in this four-book Vermont Humanities Council discussion series facilitated by VHC scholar Richard Wizansky.

Vermonters know as well as anyone the rich metaphors inherent in farming and gardening. These authors dig deep to explore the philosophical roots, family dynamics, and personal enrichment associated with tending and growing

The series begins with Michael Pollan’s Second Nature.

Eight years ago, Pollan bought an old Connecticut dairy farm. He planted a garden and attempted to follow Thoreau’s example: do not impose your will upon the wilderness, the woodchucks, or the weeds. That ethic did not, of course, work. But neither did pesticides or firebombing the woodchuck burrow.

So Pollan began to think about the troubled borders between nature and contemporary life. The result is a funny, profound, and beautifully written book in the finest tradition of American nature writing. A blend of meditation, autobiography, and social history, it inspires thoughts on the war of the roses; sex and class conflict in the garden; virtuous composting; the American lawn; seed catalogs; and the politics of planting a tree.

The series continues the following Wednesdays at 7 p.m. with these books:

• Sept. 19, Sue Hubbell’s A Country Year: Living the Questions, 1986.

• Nov. 14, Jamaica Kindaid’s My Garden.

• Dec. 12, Jane Brox’s Here and Nowhere Else.

These books are available now at the Main Circulation desk. For more information, contact the library at 802-254-5290, or visit www.brooks.lib.vt.us.

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