About
I’m a writer living beside the Prespa Lakes in northern Greece. The first trans-boundary park in the Balkans, the Prespa Lakes basin is shared with Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and is home to a rich range of people and languages, mammals and birds, wild flowers and amphibians. It’s a place of remarkable diversity, and I enjoy exploring and photographing this richness whenever I can.
My book, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World, will be published on September 1st, 2013. Chosen as the winner of the 2012 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction, the judge Terry Tempest Williams described it as “a tapestry of embodied stories…a book of faith in the natural histories of community.”
Read MoreThe Small Heart of Things
I’m thrilled to announce that my book manuscript has won the 2012 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award Series for Creative Nonfiction. The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World explores some of the myriad ways in which we come to be at home, and how connections to the natural world can be deepened when an equality of perception is applied to our relationships.
From a caterpillar carrying its house of leaves to transhumant shepherds ranging the high Prespa mountains, from a quail seeking cover on a seemingly empty steppe to the plight of a Turkmen family emigrating from Afghanistan to Istanbul, the narrative spans the common, and often contested, ground that supports both human and natural communities alike. It seeks the smaller stories that sustain us. The book will be published on October 15th, 2013 by the excellent University of Georgia Press.
Read MoreNotes from Near and Far
Notes from Near and Far is my blog on the nature of place. It’s hard to define place at all, let alone precisely. For some it might be wilderness, for others civilisation. It could equally be a meeting ground of the two. And that’s what makes it so inviting – its rough edges and overlooked shades, the so-close-to-home that it’s easily missed.
As Alix Kates writes: “Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there’s probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.” We are continually capable of deepening that acquaintance, of becoming intimate with more than one place as long as the mystery keeps us curious. Notes from Near and Far hopes to follow that mystery that lends place its unique and ineffable signature.
Read More"...we are not strangers in the world if we remain open to awe and respectful of the tenacious spirit required to live in place..." ~ Terry Tempest Williams
Notes from Near and Far
