Books

Wetlands

Leave a Comment / Animals, Books, Inspiration

Wetlands Mel Shaw I’m in love all over again. Each spring I revisit one of David M. Carroll’s outstanding wetland books: The Year of the Turtle: A Natural History, Swampwalker’s Journal: A Wetlands Year, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook. Even while flurries still sting my cheeks, I turn to Carroll as a gateway into …

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A Gift of Wings

Leave a Comment / Animals, Birds, Books, Nature

A Gift of Wings Merak’s feather, beautifully beaded for me by my friend Mireille Lapointe Long ago, through the Ministry of Natural Resources, my husband and I were given the gift of caring for, and hopefully rewilding, a young red-tailed hawk, whom we called Merak. I wrote about this remarkable adventure in my book A …

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Still Singing
Still Singing It is the first day of my new year and I am still singing. In the decade following what one doctor called “the catastrophic death” of my beloved husband after 47 years of an exceptional marriage, I am still learning to walk alone. Walking on with big steps and little ones, (and occasionally […]
The Hill of Summer
ABOUT SMALL, WITH GREAT LOVE I’m sorry to have been irregular here lately. I’ve decided that I need to spend the summer focusing on my memoir about a girl with artist parents growing up in a woods. But I miss writing to you. Already the topics are piling up. I look forward to returning in […]
Biology of an Old Farm
The Biology of an Old Farm When we first met Glenn Wiggins and his wife Carol, Glenn mentioned to Barry that the only thing he regretted about Oakdale, their beloved farm in eastern Ontario, was the lack of vernal pools. (These are typically small, shallow, ephemeral water bodies, which have no permanent inlet or outlet. […]
Memoir
Writing Memoir So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. Gaston Bachelard In my last post I wrote about one of my life-changing memories. Today I want to talk about the experience of revisiting memories in writing and to suggest that you might like to do this too. First, […]
Nature Writer
Courtesy of Mel Shaw How I Became a Nature Writer Originally published in A Wing in the Door I grew up surrounded by a small woods and, because of my artist parents’ solitary life, the trees became more my kin than people will ever be. But alas, for all its charm, my woods was threatened […]