First, a big, sincere thanks to everyone who came out for Vivian Gornick yesterday and made our first Thoreau Farm Forum a great success. We had a very nice turnout, a highly engaged audience, and of course a famously engaging speaker (and topic!). Continue reading
Author Archives: Wen Stephenson
Post-forum notes & #Occupy reads
Posted in The Roost
Vivian Gornick on Emma and #OWS
“The most alive is the wildest,” Thoreau wrote. I couldn’t help thinking of that line as I read the first pages of Vivian Gornick’s Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, the book she’ll be reading from and discussing at our first Thoreau Farm Forum at Concord Academy this Sunday. Read Gornick’s opening paragraph, and you’ll see what I mean. It draws a bead on Thoreau’s idea of wildness as something within — something he wanted to liberate. She writes: Continue reading
Introducing ‘The Roost’
I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
–Walden, Ch. 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”
I’m sitting here in the office at Thoreau Farm, in the house where Henry David Thoreau was born, in 1817, out on Virginia Road in Concord, Mass. It’s late-morning, quiet inside and out, another unseasonably mild winter day. A few minutes ago I took a brisk walk around the property. The house itself has been moved a few hundred yards from its original site, but I’m glad to say it still has a small working farm out back, a local community food project called Gaining Ground, dedicated to hunger relief in the area. An organic farm with a social conscience – it’s hard to imagine a better neighbor to Henry’s birthplace, or a better image with which to begin this blog.
This is my first post here on The Roost, the blog that Thoreau Farm Trust has invited me to write and edit. Continue reading
Posted in News and Events, The Roost