Showing results by author "Helen Humphreys" in All Categories

Henry David Thoreau's connection to nature was tied to his feelings of grief: before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died. The forests were being destroyed by the logging industry. Wildlife was increasingly slaughtered for profit and sport. The railroad clanged through his quiet hometown. And the catastrophes of the American Civil War were beginning to stir. Haunting in its quiet spaces, Followed by the Lark is a novel of meditations—on loss, on change, on the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world.

Downed during his first mission, James Hunter is taken captive as a German POW. To bide the time, he studies a nest of redstarts at the edge of camp. Some prisoners plot escape; some are shot. And then, one day, James is called to the kommandant's office. Meanwhile, back home, James' new wife, Rose, is on her own, free in a way she has never known. Then, James' sister, Enid, loses everything during the Blitz and must seek shelter with Rose. In a cottage near Ashdown forest, the two women jealously guard secrets but form a surprising friendship.

Award-winning poet and novelist Helen Humphreys returns to her series of nature meditations in this gorgeously written and illustrated book that takes a deep look at the forgotten world of herbariums and the people who amassed collections of plant specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries. From Emily Dickinson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s collections to the amateur naturalists whose names are forgotten but whose collections still grace our world, herbariums are the records of the often-humble plants that are still with us and those that are lost.

Canwood, Saskatchewan, 1947. Leonard Flint, a lonely boy in a small farming town befriends the local outsider, a man known as Rabbit Foot Bill. Bill doesn’t talk much, but he allows Leonard to accompany him as he sets rabbit snares and to visit his small, secluded dwelling. Being with Bill is everything to young Leonard - an escape from school, bullies and a hard father. So his shock is absolute when he witnesses Bill commit a sudden violent act and loses him to prison.

An artist's solitude is a sacred space, where the sparks of inspiration can be kindled into fires of creation. But within this quiet also lie loneliness, self-doubt, the danger of collapsing too far inward. What an artist needs, Helen Humphreys would say, is a dog. And a Dog Called Fig is a memoir of the writing life told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime, including Fig, her new Vizsla puppy. Interspersed are stories of other writers and their own irreplaceable companions.

Inspired by his journals and writing, this moving novel inhabits the life and mind of renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau, revealing the deep connections between his time and our own. Composed in short, compelling scenes, Followed by the Lark is a novel of significant moments in a life, capturing loss, change and the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world, set against a backdrop of great change and tumult in America.

Award-winning author Helen Humphreys tells a beautiful tale in this brilliant memoir of the writing life as told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime.

And a Dog Called Fig is a memoir of the writing life told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime, including Fig, her new Vizsla puppy. Interspersed are stories of other writers and their own irreplaceable companions: Virginia Woolf and Grizzle, Gertrude Stein and Basket, Thomas Hardy and Wessex—who walked the dining table at dinner parties, taking whatever he liked—and many more.