Heather Durham
Heather Durham (she/her) is a bird-watching, tree-sitting, journal-scribbling hermit with an MS in environmental biology and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of Wolf Tree: An Ecopsychological Memoir in Essays from Wayfarer Books (2022), and Going Feral: Field Notes on Wonder and Wanderlust from Wandering Aengus Press (2019). Born and raised in New England, Heather currently lives, writes, and plays on the traditional lands of the Snohomish and Snoqualmie tribes, in the Cascades foothills of the Pacific Northwest.
nonfiction
Sylvan Crone
A Midlife Quest
Trade Paperback | 5.5 x 8.5 | 200 pps | 978-1965320327
In this third collection, Heather Durham invites you into the lush terrain of a feral human in relationship with the more-than-human world, encountering new insights in the realms of folklore, feminism, ecophysiology, mental illness, and mysticism. Entering midlife as a single, queer, non-mothering, hypersensitive, forest-dwelling hermit in the midst of personal and cultural turmoil, she finds herself continually engaged with the question, who am I, and in these essays discovers twenty unique, profound, visceral, evocative, and still-evolving answers. At once restless and rooted, these lyric forays immerse in a single ecological landscape—in relationship with black bear and coyote, cedar and hemlock, water ouzel, and chickadee, salmon, and stream—and yet they range far, epic meanderings in the vast and changeable internal wilderness of a lifelong seeker.
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"A wise book about our wise years, offering a clear-eyed, clear-hearted path to inhabit elderdom. Durham shares universal adventures of aging with honesty and wonder, exploring a reflective heart and a wiser, truer soul.”
“This journey, rooted in nature as teacher and partner, shows what is earned by deeply listening. Durham writes with compassion, weaving her wounds and scars into words that become medicine for us all.”
“In twenty vivid vignettes, Durham takes readers on her journey to becoming a wise elder, exploring roles and struggles that resonate deeply. Her invitation to ‘pull together’ provides profound companionship.”
nonfiction
Wolf Tree
An Ecopsychological Memoir-in-essay
Also Available on Amazon – US & Global > B&N > Bookshop.org > Apple > Walmart > Target > Waterstones > Betterworld Books > In Your Local Bookstore
Praise Wolf Tree
“Wolf Tree is magic; not in the manner of the wide-eyed crystal-kisser, but vibrant and gritty, fecund and restrained, and layered with a forest floor of metaphor and experience revealed from a life lived engulfed in it. She reminds us we humans are noisy animals but then, time and again, reveals the truths we may discover if we approach the world, like so many of our relatives do, in silence. This is a holy book.”
—Chris LaTray, award-winning author of One-Sentence Journal
“Wow. That is the word I spoke aloud over and over while reading Wolf Tree. Durham’s new book is nine kinds of beautiful. Fearless, authentic, raw, glistening, intense, wondering, wandering, untethered, highly original. Wolf Tree is nothing short of stunning.”
—‚Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Rooted
“Wolf Tree is a richly textured mosaic…Through a striking, openly vulnerable, and deeply personal examination of many kinds of relationships runs a tension between solitude and community. As she travels between the unpredictable, often fraught company of other people and the balm of wilderness, Durham wonders, Where, and how, might I belong? In these pages, we are able to live those questions and their accompanying aches and pleasures. Like the sea glass Durham ponders, this book is a true gift.”
—Derek Sheffield, Poetry Editor of Terrain.org
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