Feb 26: Bad Naturalist – Paula Whyman
One Woman’s Attempt to Restore 200 Acres of Farmland in the Blue Ridge Mountains
With humor, humility, and awe, writer Paula Whyman faces her limitations, while getting to know a breathtaking corner of the natural world.
When she first climbed a peak in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains looking for a home in the country, she had no idea how little she knew about hands-on conservation, or how quickly her tidy backyard ecology project would grow into a massive endeavor.
From Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop we explore some of Paula’s many challenges, failures, and successes as she learns hour by hour how to work with nature and its seasons, with indigenous versus invasive growth, and nature … the ultimate boss.
Meet Paula Whyman
Paula Whyman’s new book, Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop, is a blend of memoir, natural history, and conservation science. Her short story collection You May See a Stranger, earned praise from The New Yorker, a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and won the Towson Prize for Literature. Paula Whyman’s stories have appeared in journals including McSweeney’s Quarterly and Virginia Quarterly Review, and her fiction was selected for the anthology Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review. Whyman’s nonfiction has been featured on NPR, and in the Washington Post, The American Scholar, and The Rumpus. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Scoundrel Time.
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