Founding editor Sandy Stott recently retired from Concord Academy, where he served as a teacher of English and chair of the English Department. Sandy founded The Roost as an extension of his longtime interest in Henry Thoreau’s work. Sandy’s junior and senior elective course, Thoreau and Kindreds, set out to answer Emerson’s question at the beginning of Nature: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” And that seems a good question for each of us. Why take someone else’s word for such a crucial relationship? But, as Henry Thoreau knew, such original relation comes only to those who seek out and wander in the natural world.
From the time when his parents introduced him to the mountains at age two, Sandy has sought out trails as a way of forming relations with the universe and understanding parts of it. Today, those trails – whether in the Concord area (Estabrook Woods, Fairhaven Bay, Great Meadows) or in his home terrain, New Hampshire’s White Mountains – shape the necessary complement to his interior work of reading, teaching and writing.
An editor-at-large and frequent contributor to the journal Appalachia, Sandy also served as its editor-in-chief from 1989-1999.