“We are with the trees every day, we live with them.”
This interview was extra special because I had a chance to talk with my fellow Oregon State University Press author, Ann Stinson. I met Ann in Portland last April when we had a reading together at Broadway Books. I loved the chance to compare and contrast farming and forestry and I appreciated the chance to discuss her beautiful memoir, The Ground at my Feet: Sustaining a Family and a Forest, and the history of family forests in the Pacific Northwest.
Ann Stinson grew up near Toledo, Washington. After high school, her interests took her to Japan, New York City, and Portland, Oregon. She earned a BA in English from Western Washington University and a MA in East Asian Languages and Culture from Columbia University. A former school teacher, she is president of the Family Forest Foundation and is on the board of the Washington Farm Forestry Association.
About the Book:
The Ground at My Feet is a memoir about loss and grief as well as a portrait of a family, a region, and an industry. Combining personal story and research, Stinson weaves essays, poems, history, and science into a rich and layered account of life in a family forest in the Pacific Northwest. She maps interactions between the land and its people over two centuries: the Cowlitz peoples, homesteaders, and several generations of logging families who have worked the property. She follows her family’s logs as they become lumber for fence boards and suburban homes, touring a local cedar mill and traveling with her father to visit mills in Japan.
Stinson adds a landowner’s voice to conversations about the human tendency to demand more of the land than it can sustain. With its uniquely personal view of the Pacific Northwest’s timber and forestry heritage, The Ground at My Feet is an engaging addition to the literature of the landscape and ecology of the West.
Information on The Family Forest Foundation
For more information & videos visit Ann Stinson’s Writing World
Tree Books Mentioned:
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Susan Simard
The Overstory by Richard Powers
