Apprentice to a Mountain

A lyrical hybrid manuscript, written during the global pandemic. This book is a place-based narrative set in rural Vermont, offering a poetic picture of a woman painting a mountain, and becoming a mountain in mid-life, through the process of learning to make her own natural paint pigments, during a pandemic and growing climate crisis. It asks the question, how can we become intimate with our bittersweet and temporal existence? Seventeen works of original art, made with hand-crafted inks, illustrate journal entries, short essays and poetry of rural life, the creative process, and the tender human condition inside a crisis. For the contemplative reader and artist, this book exists in the space between Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds, Margaret Renkl's Late Migrations, and Brian Doyle's One Long River of Song.