For 17 years Charlotte Gill worked as a tree-planter in clear cuts across Canada.
Her bestselling memoir, Eating Dirt: Deep Forest, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-planting Tribe, journeys through B.C.’s coastal rainforests in exploration of the wild and solitary lives of professional silvicultural workers. This Vancouver Island story is a slice of tree-planting life in all its soggy, gritty exuberance as well as a look at the role that conifer plantations play in the logging industry.
Can tree farms replace original forest ecosystems, which contain some of the world’s largest organisms, our slowest-growing “renewable” resource?
Gill will give a slideshow and reading from her book Eating Dirt on Feb. 3, from 1-3 p.m. at the Museum at Campbell River. A book signing will follow the presentation.
Gill’s tree-planting book was nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the Charles Taylor Prize, and two B.C. Book Prizes.
It won the 2012 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her previous book, Ladykiller, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and winner of the B.C. Book Prize for fiction.
Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and many magazines. Gill teaches creative writing at UBC and the Banff Centre.
She is this year’s Haig-Brown Writer-in-Residence. Call the Museum at 250-287-3103 to register.
The cost for the talk is $5.