A Little Wildness: Notes on Rambling

What does a good long ramble in the woods tell us about our shared experiences, our loneliness. Is it possible to shed our civilized layers of defensive behavior, our fear of unmasking and discovery, of the unknown or once-known and forgotten? Join celebrated outdoorsman and poet Sydney Lea as he walks off into his beloved New England woods on a vision quest that touches everyone who reads along to keep him company. One’s own shape-shifting powers come into focus in the light of Lea’s surprising discoveries and revelations.

Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review andwas Vermont’s poet laureate from 2011 to 2015. The author of 23 books, Lea is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, and for more than four decades he taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Middlebury, and Wesleyan colleges and was, for thirteen of those, on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has long been active in conservation, especially in Maine, where he led two campaigns that conserved over 400,000 acres, 60,000 of which became community forest in one of the state’s poorest counties. In 2012, he was named a Hero of Conservation by Field & Stream magazine. He is married with five children and seven grandchildren and lives in Newbury, Vermont.