david gessner

My essay on the competing demands of writing and teaching, "Those Who Write, Teach," will appear in The New York Times Magazine on September 21. (To see more on my pedagogical split personality, watch my video The Professor Transforms)

Soaring with Fidel is now out in paperback.

My essay "The Dreamer Did Not Exist," which originally appeared in The Oxford American, has been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008.

Last summer I paddled the Charles River with eco-planner Dan Driscoll, who has helped re-green the river. To read "Riding the Wild Charles," published in OnEarth magazine, click here.

Listen to my essay on wildness for This I Believe on NPR's All Things Considered. The essay will be published as part of the next This I Believe collection this fall.

The essay, "Learning to Surf," originally published in Orion, won the 2006 John Burroughs Award for Best Essay.

Nice excerpt of Soaring in the Boston Globe Magazine this past Sunday April 29.

Early Reviews of Soaring:
"A grand adventure, not just for birders and nature lovers." Kirkus Reviews

"Gessner writes beautifully, with grace and humor."
Publishers' Weekly

For more information, visit my new website, ospreyworld.com. The site features maps, photos, and cartoons from the trip, as well as an interactive forum and listings of talks I'll be doing up and down the East coast this upcoming spring and summer.

In Fall '05 Beacon Press published The Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons from a Life in Nature Bill McKibben writes of Prophet: "This book is an enormous gift, an act of preservation as important as any chunk of land purchased by The Nature Conservancy."

Watch my (wild) new YouTube Movie

Visit my new osprey website at www.ospreyworld.com

For a film on how I keep my fine figure: Skiing the Beach

BIO:
David Gessner is the author of six books, including Sick of Nature, The Prophet of Dry Hill, and Return of the Osprey, which was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year and the Book-of-the-Month club as one of its top books of the year. The Globe called it a "classic of American Nature Writing." His latest book is Soaring with Fidel, in which he follows the osprey migration from Cape Cod to Cuba and Venezuela and back. In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize, in 2007 he won the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay, and his has an essay forthcoming in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals including The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, and Orion. He has taught environmental writing at Harvard, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he edits the national literary journal, Ecotone.

NOTES:

June 2008

The big news here is the publication of my wife's first novel. Gossip of the Starlings, by Nina de Gramont, is due out June 10.

We have landed back on Cape Cod for the summer. I am heading up to Alaska this week to teach/read at the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference from Jun 6-10. Then I will speak at the Rachel Carson Enviro Writing Conference on Friday June 13. I will also be teaching a writing workshop at Provincetown Arts during the week of June 22nd. To learn more, please visit here.

Current projects include working on my novel, The Adventures of Mr. Id, a modern re-telling of the Jekyll-Hyde story. To get a hint of what it will be about you can look at the (so-called wild) video above.

Also daydreaming about publishing My Green Manifesto (above) in book form. It's a kind of a distillation of my eco thinking over the last decade.

It has been a big year for Ecotone with pieces selected by the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and Best New Stories of the South.


Old News:

I am considering turning Wormtown, my black humor memoir of testicular cancer in Worcester, MA, into a graphic novel.

The essay "Benediction" was featured in the the 2006 Pushcart Prize Anthology. In a review on Feb 15th the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Another mandatory gem is David Gessner's vibrant reckoning of his relationship with his mentor, the great Harvard literary scholar W. Jackson Bate. Mr. Gessner describes his undergraduate enthusiasm for the writings of Thomas Wolfe, once himself a Harvard student. But it is Bate's lectures on English literature that truly galvanize Mr. Gessner. At one point, Bate compares "the worst excesses of postmodernism and deconstruction to those of neoclassicism:a dry emphasis on reason, on mind; a focus on games." Bate imagines the possibility of a "new romanticism," and Mr. Gessner is stirred to try a "new Romantic" writing project of his own, befriending Bate along the way. But the course of the friendship - and of the writing -does not always run smooth. Mr Gessner's memoir is both touching and surprising."

To see an excerpt of this piece, published in the Georgia Review, click here.