Drunk in the Woods
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Author: Tony Whedon
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1732266204
ISBN 13: 978-1732266209
“Sometimes,” Tony Whedon tells us in his brilliant new book, Drunk in the Woods, “I think there's such a thing as an alcoholic landscape.” With such clarity Whedon tells of his close-to-the-bone experiences of gardening, cutting wood, and exploring the back country of northern Vermont woven into a lively, sometimes harrowing personal narrative, providing a fresh perspective on how “living wild” impinges on the mind of the suffering-and-then recovering alcoholic.
For much of his life, Whedon lived off-the-grid with his wife in a one-room cabin suffering in winter darkness and spring floods, drinking heavily and then making a go of it in recovery. An introductory chapter sets the tone for Drunk in the Woods. The Chinese poetry tradition of the sage tipsy on too much wine and too much Nature is evoked in “Form, Shadow, Spirit.” The book’s main themes―the darks and lights of backwoods loneliness, the transcendent clarity that drinking and sobering up in the woods provides―are developed here.
The book proceeds with thoughtful chapters on Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin
folded into meditations on birds of the northern forest, animal tracks, and the metaphysics of
sobriety.
From the Author
Much of Walden is about living on the edge of things – the edge of town, the shores of a pond, the fence line between meadows and forest, and the seasonal edge between fall and winter, winter and spring. It’s about change and the liminal nature of reality inspired by Thoreau’s readings of the Upanishads and the Gita and by his naturalistic observations. Like Walden, Drunk in the Woods is about marginal existence -- the borderland between the pastoral and the wild in Northern New England, the shaky peripheries of sobriety and drunkenness: the collection's title Drunk in the Woods functions as a conceit for the “tipsy” state of consciousness living close to nature provides me, invoking in several essays classical Chinese poetry.
As in Walden, Drunk in the Woods moves rhythmically between ideas and concrete facts: my exploratory essay “Wild Turkeys Roosting,” for example, describes several species of animal tracks and probes how scats and tracks reflect the comings and goings of deer, moose, coyotes, bobcats and wild turkeys; in their "cross-hatchings" on Spring snow I see images of my own scrawly attempts at writing.
Suzanne and I lived for twelve years in our mountain cabin, no electricity or running water, writing poems, cutting wood, and swatting black flies while Thoreau spent two years on Walden Pond, writing about nature and developing his Transcendentalist vision. For better and worse he inspired us to live as simply as we did: out of our backwoods experience came this book.
About the Author
Tony Whedon iis the author of three books of poems and a prize-winning essay collection. He is a working trombone player and the leader of the poetry/jazz ensemble PoJazz. Along with Neil Shepard, he founded Green Mountains Review. He lives with his wife Suzanne in Montgomery, Vermont.
