A Program in Partnership with the Thoreau Society
Author talks and writing workshops that encourage critical thinking and perceptive writing about the world and ourselves.
Explore the List of Past Programs Watch Recordings of Past Programs
Upcoming Fall 2025
But was he Autistic? Thoreau’s Walden as a Self-Help Guide for Readers on the Spectrum
Dr. Julie Brown will share her ideas about Thoreau’s place on the autism spectrum. She believes that his neurobiology influenced the content, themes, and style of his writing. Walden functions not only as a type of autistic memoir, but as a “self-help” guide that could be of great value to others on the spectrum.
We are delighted to also offer this program on Zoom. Please register here to join us virtually.
Writing Your Story in the Woods
October 11 & 12, 2025
$200/person
No story is like yours — and your telling it is powerful and necessary. Join this workshop to find your woods and tell your story.
In this two-day workshop, national memoirist & distinguished teacher Dr. Barbara Mossberg invites you “to the woods” — a place to find focus, inspiration, connection, and support for developing your memoir. Experiments, prompts and exercises in this workshop are designed to invite, inquire, and invoke your own “woods” through Thoreau’s lens of living purposefully.
Clown Cantos – An Evening with Barbara Mossberg
Everything Is Alive In Its Own Way, Singing
October 12, 2025
6:00 pm
At Wright Tavern
FREE
Registration encouraged.
Join us for a lively and luminous evening with celebrated poet, scholar, and memoirist Dr. Barbara Mossberg, as she brings to life her latest work, Clown Cantos: Everything Is Alive In Its Own Way, Singing. Inspired by Radiotopia’s Everything Is Alive, Dolly Parton, Dante, Dickinson, Einstein, Emerson—and always, Thoreau—Mossberg invites us to hear the hidden music of the everyday: the heroic worm, the comic leaf, the poignant truth of our place in the cosmos.
A free, public event—come laugh, listen, and leave seeing your own life with new eyes. All are welcome.
Interested in learning more with Dr. Barbara Mossberg? Check out her memoir intensive.
Gossamer Days:
The Poetics of Thoreau’s Last Seasons
Friday, October 24
7:00 PM
Concord Free Public Library, 129 Main St., Concord
Join author Kristen Case for a reading and conversation drawn from her new book, Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar (Milkweed Editions), an exploration of Thoreau’s final work. Focusing on the chapter “Gossamer Days,” Case reflects on Thoreau’s return to his seasonal charts in the final months of his life, when illness confined him to his house on Main Street. Drawing on the journals, weather observations, river measurements, and natural phenomena he had painstakingly recorded for over a decade, Thoreau constructed a new kind of relationship to the living world—one sustained by memory, pattern, and reflection. Case traces how October’s gossamer threads—visible only in slant sunlight—became for Thoreau metaphors of interconnectedness, resilience, and the strange abundance of the year’s turning.
Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. In addition to Thoreau’s Kalendar, she is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe and three books of poetry, most recently, Daphne. She lives in Maine.
This program is co-sponsored by the Concord Free Public Library and presented as part of the Concord Festival of Authors.
We are delighted to also offer this program on Zoom. Please register here to join us virtually. Register to Attend Virtually
Thursday, November 20