NOTES ON THE LANDSCAPE OF HOME
*Finalist for the 2023 Maine Literary Awards in Nonfiction*
About Notes on the Landscape of Home:
"Notes on the Landscape of Home confirms Susan Hand Shetterly’s status as one of Maine’s and this country’s finest environmental writers. Like Terry Tempest Williams, who lives nearby on the Blue Hill peninsula, Shetterly weaves personal life experience into outward-looking essays that focus in large part on nature and our interactions with it." - Carl Little, The Working Waterfront, March 2023 (click for full text)
"[Shetterly’s] essays, which touch on the trees, fish, people, birds and plants she encounters around her Maine community of Surry, shimmer with luminous details. With her poet’s eye for the particular, she’s not one for the bland abstractions and bumper-sticker slogans that tend to ossify reflections on the environment. As the pandemic recedes and more of us resume our busy lives, Notes on the Landscape of Home is a potent reminder of what we gain by staying mindful of local wonders.” - Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal, Sept 15, 2022 (click for full text)
"Susan Hand Shetterly’s essays in Notes on the Landscape of Home are elegiac and focused on the future at the same time. She describes the wild world around her—in all its complexity—with eloquence and precision. Her writing is imbued with a sense of wonder. To walk in the woods and fields and along the shore with her is to see ourselves and our place on the planet in a new way." - Stu Kestenbaum, former Poet Laureate of the state of Maine
"This is an exceptional collection of essays from a writer undoubtedly grounded in both time and place. Reading this book is like taking a journey to where everything touches the senses, making it both real and personal. In the opening preface to her book, Shetterly shares a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that provides a clue as to how the magic happens if one pays close attention to all things on land, in water, community and the wildlife that wraps itself around it all.
'At the still point of the turning world ...
there the dance is ...'
The still point for Shetterly is this place called Maine — the small neighborhood in a small town where she lives — and the dance, she says, 'is between the individual lives of the many species that live here, the community we make together, and time.'” - RJ Heller, Bangor Daily News, Dec 16, 2022 (click for full text)
"It takes a fiery heart to create such calm on the page, a leaping eye to notice so much of nature and fix it for us in words, a generous spirit to share so much of the world. And what a world comes alive in Notes on the Landscape of Home: full of people, certainly, but animated by other spirits, those of the birds and trees and rocks and mammals and fish and waving kelps we live among, also the four winds and the rising waters, the life-giving sun, this fast-dancing planet, the cosmos it occupies, home in the biggest sense. Susan Hand Shetterly brings hope amid the quiet terrors of contemporary life, teaches us again the quiet contemplation we knew as kids, before our power to destroy outran curiosity. A beautiful book of essays, poetry really, beach reading that truly knows the sea, a bouquet of quiet moments to open in troubling times, sample again and again, a basket of solutions." - Bill Roorbach, author of Lucky Turtle, Temple Stream, Life Among Giants
“'Notes on the Landscape of Home' is quite simply a lovely read, perfect for reminding us what we have come through in recent years and the wonders that await us in the days to come." - Nan Lincoln, Ellsworth American, Dec 29, 2022 (click for full text)
"Susan Hand Shetterly’s writing is exquisite, expansive at times as she honors famous regional figures whose work has influenced her, people like Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer, J. J. Audubon and Henry David Thoreau. At other times she interweaves beautiful intimate observations of nature and the coastal landscape with a deep sensitivity to color, time, sound and sand. Shetterly marvels at the wonder of baby eels, elvers, as they make their way from the Sargasso Sea north to the Coast of Maine as reverently as she honors the epically large leviathan—the right whale as it tends to its calf off the coast. Notes on the Landscape of Home is bursting with the love of place." - Adelaide Murphy Tyrol, award-winning illustrator and painter
"Susan Shetterly has written a beautiful book about this beautiful part of Maine. She has written a book about home, that ethereal yet vital connection between land and the people who invest themselves in it. Most importantly, she has written a book about the hope we can find in that connection, and the role it will play in making a better future. Within, you will find people putting their hands on the land in acts of protection, learning, and healing. Nothing seems more important to me in this era of climate change—especially for young people—than to clearly enunciate that hope is held, not in just a feeling, but in these many acts of caring." - Hans M. Carlson, Executive Director, Blue Hill Heritage Trust
SEAWEED CHRONICLES
*Longlisted for the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
*Shortlisted for the 2019 New England Society Book Awards in the Specialty Title Category
*Junior Library Guild 2018 Gold Standard Selection
About Seaweed Chronicles:
"Shetterly...wades through muck and crawls through poison ivy to spy on the myriad species that share the intertidal zone: sandpipers, petrels, periwinkles, brine shrimp. All depend, for some part of their lives, on the rockweed for food or shelter. Shetterly writes in the tradition of Rachel Carson, who meticulously described this coast and its seaweeds in The Edge of the Sea (1955). While Carson cataloged rich biodiversity, Shetterly’s story is one of loss, uncertainty, and invasive green crabs....
She tramps through the human ecosystem as well, visiting kelp farms and interviewing economists, ecologists, and marine policymakers. Anyone who has ever dipped a toe into New England fisheries knows how contentious, and wickedly complex, any discussion of marine extraction can become, and Shetterly is a circumspect but sensitive guide." - Lucy Jakub, "The Oldest Forest," The New York Review of Books (click for full text).
"You might not expect unfettered passion on the topic of seaweed, but Shetterly is such a great storyteller that you find yourself following along eagerly." - Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
"Shetterly's elegant, attentive look at algae...examines the important part seaweed plays in a web of existence of a number of other species.... Shetterly highlights the poetry and drama of the interrelation of things...." - The Boston Globe
"Shetterly folds human stories into the wild ones, lifting each new strand to join the others as in a French braid, pulled tight and practical like the community of weathered Mainers itself.... Shetterly's spare, lyrical prose depicts the essence and detail of people, wildlife, seaweed, and sea so that they stay with me long after I close the book." - Orion Magazine (click for full text)
"A call, not to turn back the clock, but to live deliberately and take stock of the things we don't want to lose." - Wall Street Journal (click for full text)
"Riveting...a lyrical and timely chronicle." - BBC Culture
"A lovely, first-person consideration of the diaphanous organisms--and an evaluation of their environmental history and promise: a carbon-absorbing environmental superhero, macro-algae biofuel may fuel your VWs and Hondas in the future, to boot." - Vogue
"A measured, wise little book." - Portland Press Herald
"Shetterly dives into the world of iconic algae and the societies and ecosystems that depend upon it...." - The Revelator
"There are books that change the way you see things.... "Seaweed Chronicles" is a fascinating portrait of this valuable, increasingly threatened resource and a passionate plea for its wise management." - The Washington Post (click for full text)
"Lessons From Seaweed" by Mark W. Anderson, Bangor Daily News (full text below)
"Most Mainers know something about seaweed, some of what they know might even be true. My mother sang the praises of dulse in her diet, though I recall that she rarely ate it. My father used what we called rockweed from the shores of Penobscot Bay to enrich his vegetable garden. R.P.T. Coffin describes the treat of a “…sea-moss farina pudding” in November of his Coast Calendar. Seaweed is woven into the culture of Maine.
Susan Hand Shetterly really does know a lot about seaweed, and her new book Seaweed Chronicles is captivating, a book every Mainer should read. Maine has a tradition of engaging fiction writers who interpret life here to the larger world. When it comes to non-fiction, Maine is linked to two profoundly important writers of the 20thCentury, E.B. White and Rachel Carson. Shetterly’s new work reminds me of both.
In The Elements of Style White admonishes us to “avoid unnecessary words.” In Seaweed Chronicles every word counts. There is a sparse, crystalline quality to Shetterly’s writing, evoking the very coastline she describes. In the tradition of Rachel Carson, Seaweed Chronicles is a cautionary tale. She weaves stories of the people from Maine’s coastal communities with science that should inform our exploitation of the bounties of nature. The book is, at the same time, both authentically Maine, and deeply learned.
The book makes me think of the idea of home. The ancient Greek word for home (or household or family) is Oikos. This is the root for two English words at the heart of Shetterly’s book, ecology and economics. Seaweed Chronicles exemplifies both the first law of ecology and the first law of economics:
- Everything is connected to everything else
- There is no such thing as a free lunch
In our exploitation of Maine’s seemingly abundant marine resources, we have ignored both of these laws, at our peril. By viewing the natural world as individual buckets we can draw from (the cod fishery, for example), we ignore the complex interactions of ecosystems with many parts and violate the first law of ecology. By viewing that same natural world as a gift, available to the first person who figures out how to exploit nature best, we violate the first law of economics.
Seaweed Chronicles makes clear that both of these laws hold, even when we choose to ignore them. This is a book that is both a delight to read and profoundly important too. We all need pay attention."
*Selected among the top ten "smartest beach reads" for 2018 by BBC Culture
*Selected among the best new eco-books in August by the Center for Biological Diversity
SETTLED IN THE WILD
*2018 Read ME selection for Nonfiction (Maine Humanities Council and Maine State Library)
* 2011 Maine Literary Award for Best Nonfiction Book (Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance)
* Buy SITW Online: Indiebound, Amazon, Powell´s, Barnes & Noble
About Settled In the Wild:
"Shetterly is a writer whose precise eye is directly connected not just to a quicksilver mind but also a good, generous heart. Her prose is spare, elegant, rich in metaphor, and haunting."
- Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic
"With this tender and tough book, Shetterly creates an offering of native awareness that deserves to be placed alongside Aldo Leopold, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, and Noel Perrin, all writers of community, insight and resolve."
- Terry Tempest Williams, author of Finding Beauty in a Broken World
“There is magic in the way Shetterly has proceeded into her life---with daily awe and hunger---and there is generosity, eloquence, and great intelligence in this telling. Settled in the Wild is a lovely book, beautiful and enchanting, ocean-deep with the revelatory powers of discovery.”
- Rick Bass, author of Why I Came West
"With wisdom and leavening humor, Susan Hand Shetterly tells tales of a small town and the woods around it, of her family and neighbors, two-legged and four, of the sound of wind and the cacophony of silence."
- Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods
"Settled in the Wild draws a beautiful portrait of life lived in utter harmony with the natural world - life as it ought to be lived."
- Alice Waters
"What a beautiful little book. It reads like you're listening to water flowing over stones. Shetterly writes with great detail and understanding, and you feel immersed in her world."
- Lynne Cox, author of Swimming to Antartica
Interview
Listen to an interview with Susan on the Christian Science Monitor
Publishers Weekly: Starred Review
“I live on land that has not surrendered the last of its wildness," Shetterly (The New Year's Owl: Encounters with Animals, People and the Land They Share) writes of her home in rural Maine. “It keeps secrets, and those secrets prompt us to pay attention, to look for more." In her first essay collection in more than 20 years, she beautifully renders some of what she's learned in the decades since she and her then husband moved into an unfinished cabin “idealistic, dangerously unprepared, and, frankly, arrogant", she can see now. Most of these essays, however, focus on life after she's settled in, when she's learned to listen for the sounds of the coming spring through her open bedroom window or impulsively stands down a bobcat that's chased a baby rabbit into the middle of the road. Shetterly's eye for poetic detail is exquisite, especially in longer essays such as the story of how she nursed an injured raven back to health, after which it set up home on her roof and became best friends with her terrier. But she writes about her neighbors (even those she admits she never really knew) with equal grace and empathy. Let's hope it's not another quarter-century before her next collection arrives.
Indelible images abound in Shetterly's stellar collection of distinctive and revelatory essays about her life spent in and along Maine's rugged woods and coasts. A wounded garter snake is delicately placed in her coat pocket and nursed back to health in a soup pot. A blinded raven cavorts with her pet dog in a primal dance that prepares it for its return to the wild. While ice creeps and mud seeps, Shetterly waits and watches with the patience and passion of a natural-born naturalist. Nor is her precisely trained eye focused only on the life that teems in the skies and seas around her. People, too, are cause for consideration: the fisherman who encounters whales and swordfish; the garbage collector who repairs what others reject. Shetterly's penetrating observations resonate with an undeniable sense of what matters most in life: the preservation of self, the protection of wilderness, and appreciation for the passage of time in a world where speed, haste, and destruction trump leisure, care, and restoration. - Carol Haggas