Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
We spend the hour talking with Hugh Raffles about his new book, The Book Of Unconformities: Speculations On Lost Time. It’s part natural history, part memoir, part meditation on the relationships between people and rocks throughout time.
Then, at the end, a short story about the Cure Hunter from Francesca’s book Province of the Heart.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Delia Owens talks about her breakout novel, Where The Crawdads Sing. It explores isolation, connection and the healing power of Nature through the story of a young woman who lives as a hermit in a salt marsh.
Then, another novel, this time about Nature gone awry. We re-play our 2012 interview with Barbara Kingsolver about her book, Flight Behavior.
And finally, Francesca shares her story about a man who hunted healing plants in the wild regions of southern France. It’s from her memoir, Province of the Heart. Continue reading
by Francesca Rheannon
In 2001, one week after the 9/11 attacks, I arrived in the rugged, sparsely populated region of southern France’s Haute Provence for a long-planned stay. I had come to write about my father’s role in one small corner of a decades-old war, World War II, but found myself paralyzed by 9/11 and the U.S. response. In this frightening new reality, the book seemed irrelevant. But, as I tried to come to grips with this world torn apart, an entirely different book emerged, one I came to call “Province of the Heart.”
I settled in a tiny village of no more than one hundred souls, in the shadow of the mountain where the great ProvenÁ§al writer Jean Giono had once created a community of visionaries dedicated to the land and its people.
Over the eight months I lived there, that land and its people stitched my world back up again, through the deep succor of the relationship between humans and the natural world that embraced them. Yet my neighbors were no innocents living out of time; instead, they clung more fiercely to the beauty they had for knowing how much it was threatened.
The following is one story from Province of the Heart, “The Cure Hunter.” Continue reading