Author to discuss book at Citizens Library
It’s that time of year again – rutting season – when the deer that have feasted all year on your garden and flower beds seem even more likely to be leaping in front of your vehicle. They are beautiful to watch, and they are a nuisance.
Humans and these large animals have shared the environment for millennia, and that complicated relationship is explored in “The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship With Our Wild Neighbors,” by Washington native Erika Howsare.
The book is a Pen America Literary Award finalist and called “a wide-ranging and deeply intelligent investigation” by the Wall Street Journal.
Howsare will talk about her book at 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 8, at Citizens Library. It’s not a place unfamiliar to her. She grew up in Amity and graduated from Trinity High School in 1995.
After Oberlin College and earning an MFA in literary arts from Brown University, she has published two books of poetry and worked in local journalism for 20 years, covering cultural and environmental issues.
Howsare got her start as a published writer at an unusually young age: she joined the Observer-Reporter’s Young Observer corps as a seventh-grader and continued writing for those youth-oriented pages through high school.
I’m really grateful for those years,” Howsare said over the phone from her home last week. “I was a big reader of Life Magazine at that time and I thought it would be really cool to be involved in something like that. But music was important to me, and I put a lot of energy into that.”
It wasn’t until she moved to the Blue Ridge area of Virginia, where she now lives with her husband and two daughters, that she was able to combine her poetry and factual journalism into lyrical non-fiction.
“The Age of Deer” is not simply a heavily researched portrait of an animal; it is as much about mankind.
In her introduction, Howsare wrote: “To look at our modern relationship with deer, as I found, is to step into some of the discomforts – political and social – of how people live with each other. And it means asking the biggest question of all: How will we live on this planet?”
Saturday’s event is sponsored by the Friends of Citizens Library. Tickets are available at Citibooks in the library for a suggested donation of $5.