The following pieces reflect areas of growing interest for me as a teacher and writer.
The essay on Robert Frost’s “Spring Pools” was a joint-project with the ecologist Glenn Adelson, and remains my most satisfying experience of integrating aesthetic and scientific responses in the reading of a poem.
Leath Tonino’s interview for The Sun sums up my outlook on teaching at the moment of retiring from Middlebury College, as well as my perspective on the landscape and prospects of Vermont.
Ireland and the essayist and cartographer Tim Robinson are both central to Picking up the Flute, a website that is now being published as an audio book. After completing that project I wrote this introduction to a new volume celebrating Robinson’s achievements entitled Connemara and Elsewhere.
Introduction to Connemara and Elsewhere
“Galilean Tenderness Under a Warming Sky” engages with the Gospel of St. Matthew, and was commissioned for a recent publication called Passion, edited by Larry Yarbrough. This is a collection of literary responses to treatments of the Passion of Christ in the four Gospels. The present essay’s connection between my Bible-reading boyhood and climate-change, the defining ecological challenge of our time, is one upon which I hope to build.