POSTPONED: Alison Townsend

Oct. 1 update: Postponed due to rain, will be rescheduled next summer.

media release: Award-winning poet and emeritus professor of English at UW-Whitewater, Alison Townsend, will read and discuss excerpts from her memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home (UW Press), in the Lyceum series at Pied Beauty Farm in Stoughton. Townsend has been moved and formed by landscapes as diverse as rural Pennsylvania, California, and western Oregon. But The Green Hour tells her story of unexpectedly settling into a four-acre homestead of restored prairie and oak savanna outside Stoughton. A PEN/America finalist in nonfiction, this praise song to wild places explores what it means to live in community with the more-than-human world and how our identities are shaped by our interactions with it: our story, its story. Join us at the farm for wood-fired pizza at 6:00, followed by the reading at 7:00. Catherine Jagoe, author of Unbelonging: A Life In Search of Home, will interview Townsend about the book. Further information and directions available at https://piedbeautyfarm.com/lyceum/

The Lyceum is a series of monthly picnics and lectures at Pied Beauty Farm. With this series, we aim to organize a place where expert speakers spark conversations about farming, food, environmental sustainability, and justice.

The name and inspiration for our Lyceum comes from the nineteenth-century Lyceums started by Connecticut farmer, schoolteacher, and scholar Josiah Holbrook. Holbrook believed that broad engagement with science, arts, letters, history, and philosophy could transform the young American republic, so he traveled around the country encouraging small towns to start lecture halls and laboratories where ordinary people could encounter extraordinary ideas. His Lyceum movement was wildly successful.  Within just four years of convincing the citizens of Millbury, Massachusetts to start the first Lyceum in 1827, Holbrook encouraged 900 other towns to start their own.

Thoreau, Emerson, and Twain all tried out early drafts of some of their most famous works on the Lyceum circuit. For just two bucks you could have heard this 1842-1843 lineup at the Concord Lyceum.  Ours is free, but it includes neither Emerson nor Thoreau.

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