Wednesday July 27
6:30 at Blue Hill Books
26 Pleasant Street*
Blue Hill, Maine 04614
Blue Hill Books invites you to an evening with award winning author Ben Shattuck in conversation with bookseller Matt Shaw,
celebrating his new book Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau.
*additional parking available on the corner of Pleasant & Main Streets
On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.
This is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once taken by Henry David Thoreau. After the Cape, Shattuck goes up Mount Katahdin and Mount Wachusett, down the coastline of his hometown, and then through the Allagash. Along the way, Shattuck encounters unexpected characters, landscapes, and stories, seeing for himself the restorative effects that walking can have on a dampened spirit. Over years of following Thoreau, Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and fatherhood, and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life’s changing seasons.
Intimate, entertaining, and beautifully crafted, Six Walks is a resounding tribute to the ways walking in nature can inspire us all.
Ben Shattuck, a former Teaching-Writing Fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. He is the director of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency and curator of the Dedee Shattuck Gallery. His writing can be found in the Harvard Review, The Common, the Paris Review Daily, Lit Hub, and Kinfolk Magazine. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs a general store built in 1793.
From an interest in histories of place that recognize the relationship between humans and other species, Matt Shaw‘s filmmaking is centered in a process of looking and listening that engages research, conversation, and observation to read the landscape as archive.
A graduate of College of the Atlantic and the University of Illinois at Chicago, his films have been supported by LEF Foundation, Maine Arts Commission, Arteles Creative Center, and a Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowship.