My Year in Writing 2025
November 29, 2025
This is the time of year—between my birthday and year’s end—when I take stock of my writing life over the past 12 months. A trend that’s continued this year: I’ve continue to be very Berkshire-focused as we approach the fourth anniversary of our move up here. As I told one of my students at Berkshire Community College this semester, where I’ve been teaching Principles of Marketing, filling in for a professor on her sabbatical, “This is my time to give back and go hyperlocal…”
I’ve also continued to write for Berkshire Magazine—eighteen in total and sometimes as many as 4-5 articles per issue (!), causing me to joke with my editor, Anastasia Stanmeyer, “Do you have any other writers?” In addition to having the cover story in one issue this year, Anastasia generously wrote about me in her editor’s note in the Fall issue accompanied by this photo.
I’m still shopping around my book of essays, The Others in Me: On the Azores & Ancestry, Poetry & Identity, and am building a new series of essays about life on our little beaver pond in the Berkshires, which I’m calling “To Learn Attention: Encounters in the Anthropocene Backyard,” several of which were published earlier this year.
While we didn’t get to the Azores for the second year in a row—something I hope to remedy in 2026—we had a wonderfully inspiring trip to Paris in late March-early April. Overall, it’s been a productive year. Here are some of the highlights:
“A Modern Log Cabin: Industrial Chic Meets Rustic Warmth,” in Berkshire Magazine, Spring 2025
“Betting Big on the Outdoors: Paul Jahinge Leads the State’s Outdoor Recreation Vision” (profile), in Berkshire Magazine, Spring 2025
“Matt Rubiner: An Unconventional Path to Cheese Mastery” (Q&A) in Culture: The word on cheese, Spring 2025
“Ancestral Echoes: Exploring Aracelis Girmay’s An Experiment in Voices,” in Berkshire Magazine, May-June 2025
“Poetic Sweat: Bill T. Jones and His Company Return to Jacob’s Pillow” (profile), in Berkshire Magazine, May-June 2025
Attended MAPS’ Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver, CO, reporting on several future stories and features. (June)
“My Wife Gave Me Magic Mushrooms For My 60th Birthday. It Transformed My Life In Ways I Never Expected,” HuffPost, June 2025 (The response to this piece was absolutely amazing. My editor at HuffPost wrote that something like 250,000 people read it the first weekend it was published, with “an average read time of 2:46 minutes (the site average for a story is 0:40, so to get folks to stay on your piece for close to three minutes is AMAZING and means that most people read all the way through… a huge feat in today’s ‘click in and click out’ digital world).” I heard from people all over the country: people who needed to hear the message of my tory and who now have hope that there’s something out there that may be able to help them. I feel especially blessed to have published this piece this year.)
Psychedelic Healing in Practice: A conversation with Scott Edward Anderson on AdvisorShares’ AlphaNooner podcast. (July)
Opinion: Don’t let New Bedford erase its Portuguese soul – “ The proposed closure of Casa da Saudade isn’t just a budget cut, it’s cultural erasure. The library has been the beating heart of Portuguese American identity in one of America’s most Lusophone cities.(Opinion), in New Bedford Light (July)
“A Building That Dances: The Reimagined Doris Duke Theatre Takes Flight,” feature in Berkshire Magazine, July 2025
“A Landmark Farewell: Stephen Petronio in his company’s final bow this summer at Jacob’s Pillow” (Q&A), in Berkshire Magazine, July 2025
“Paul Elie on Literature, Faith, and the Culture of Encounter” (Q&A), in Berkshire Magazine, July 2025
“A Homecoming: Richard Blake Creates Great Barrington’s W.E.B. Du Bois Monument” (profile), in Berkshire Magazine, July 2025
“A Conversation Before the Conversation: A talk with Jayne Anne Phillips ahead of her visit to the Mount” (Q&A), in Berkshire Magazine, July 2025
“Threads of Time: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Returns to Jacob’s Pillow After 62 Years” (Cover story), in Berkshire Magazine, August 2025
“The Power of Words: The WIT Literary Festival Returns with a Bold Call for Civic Engagement Through Literature,” in Berkshire Magazine, August 2025
Four essays from “To Learn Attention: Encounters in the Anthropocene Backyard” in La Picciolétta Bárca, August 2025
“From Investment to Impact: Mill Town’s Blueprint for a Stronger Pittsfield and Berkshire County” (feature), in Berkshire Magazine, Fall 2025
“A Recipe for Community: Williams College’s Log Lunch brings people together over food and ideas,” in Berkshire Magazine, Fall 2025
“Making Public Lands Welcome to All: An interview with newly appointed DCR Commissioner Nicole LaChapelle” (Q&A), in Berkshire Magazine, Fall 2025
“Cheesemaking Tradition Meets Innovation in the Azores” (feature) in Culture: The word on cheese, Fall 2025
Featured poet in reading at Hot Plate Brewing Company in Pittsfield, along with Susan Buttenweiser, Anna Lotto, Matthew Zanoni Müller, and Lara Tupper. (September)
“(Take) Home (or Dine In) for the Holidays: Your guide to Thanksgiving Dining in the Berkshires” in Berkshire Magazine, Holiday 2025
“Ice Dreams Really Do Come True: Community, Competition, and Cold Weather Fun in the Berkshires” (feature) in Berkshire Magazine, Holiday 2025
“Giving Back Locally: Supporting Organizations that Strengthen Our Community” in Berkshire Magazine, Holiday 2025
“Driving Community: Berkshire Auto Dealerships are Expanding, Thriving, and Staying True to Their Roots” (feature) in Berkshire Magazine, Holiday 2025
I also started working on a new sequence of poems, “Aquapelagos,” exploring themes of islands as ancestral territories and identity markers. We’ll see where that goes…
And I continued to curate and host the Berkshire Nature Talk Series at West Stockbridge Historical Society. We had four programs this year featuring Nicaela Haig of MassAudubon, Chip Blake on the birds of the Berkshires, Thomas Tyning on reptiles and snakes, and Brian Donohue on building with local forests. The program was funded in part by grants from the Alford-Egremont, Richmond, Stockbridge, and West Stockbridge cultural councils, local agencies which are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
A productive year. Hope to keep getting my fix in 2026!
—SEA
My Year in Writing 2023
December 6, 2023
Now is the time, between my birthday and the end of the year, when I take stock of my year in writing. This year, which culminated my sixtieth trip around the Sun, has been a pretty productive year.
Here are some of the highlights:
Barzakh Magazine accepts essay, “Açorianidade & the Radiance of Sensibility” just after Xmas! (Published in January)
Reading of Berkshire Writers in Housatonic; read the first chapter of Falling Up. (January)
Guest writer @ Margarida Vale de Gato’s Eco-poetics Masters Class, Universidade de Lisboa via Zoom (January)
Alfred Lewis Bilingual Reading Series, FresnoState PBBI(part of the PBBI-FLAD lecture series 2023), Co-curators: Diniz Borges and RoseAngelina Baptista; Poets: Alberto Pereira, Sam Pereira, PaulA Neves, Scott Edward Anderson, and RoseAngelina Baptista (February)
Guest lecturer, Universidade de Lisboa, Professora Margarida Vale de Gatos’ class on American Literature in person. (March)
Guest speaker, Universidade dos Açores, Ponta Delgada, Professora Ana Cristina Gil’s class, in person. (March)
My essay, “STUDIO LOG: THE TOM TOM CLUB’S “GENIUS OF LOVE,” A MEMOIR AND EXPOSITION IN 18 TRACKS,” lost in the 2nd Round of the Marchxness battle of “One Hit Wonders” to Adam O. Davis’ essay on “In a Big Country” by Big Country. (March)
Installation of my poem. “River of Stars,” on Poetry Path at Ryan Observatory at Muddy Run, and presentation with Michele Beyer (a teacher inspired by my conversation with Derek Pitts in November 2022) to write poetry with her class. (April)
Interview by Francisco Cota Fagundes published in Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies, XLVII, as part of a special issue devoted to Celebrating Portuguese Diaspora Literature in North America. (Spring)
Guest lecturer, University of California at Santa Barbara, Portuguese literature class, Professor André Corrêa de Sá. (June)
“Love & Patience on Mt. Pico” (essay) published in The Write Launch (July)
“Through the Gates of My Ancestral Island” (essay) published in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature (July)
“Orpheu Ascending,” a review of Orpheu Literary Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2, translated from the Portuguese by David Swartz, published in Pessoa Plural—A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, Issue 23 (July)
Seeing—Reading—Writing: Transforming Our Relationship to Language and Nature: A Workshop with Ryan Shea and Scott Edward Anderson at The Nature Institute, Ghent, NY (July)
Creative nonfiction mentor, Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, mentored two students. (July)
“Birds in the Hand: The Berkshire Bird Observatory’s Impassioned Ben Nickley” (article) in Berkshire Magazine. (July)
Poetry booth, “Zucchrostic poems,” at West Stockbridge, MA, Zucchini Festival (August)
Two poems in Into the Azorean Sea: A Bilingual Anthology of Azorean Poetry, translated and organized by Diniz Borges, published by Letras Lavadas in São Miguel and Bruma Publications, Fresno State. (August)
Meet & Greet at The Book Loft in Great Barrington, MA. (Sept)
“Berkshire Brain Gain” (article) published in Berkshire Magazine (Sept)
Dedication of Binocular telescope at Ryan Observatory at Muddy Run and poems by Ada Limón and Gabe Catherman installed on Poetry Path. (October)
Visited Praia da Vitória on Terceira Island, Azores, birthplace and boyhood home of Vitorino Nemésio. (October)
Participated in Arquipélago de Escritores in Angra on Terceira Island. (October)
Met António Manuel Melo Sousa in Ponta Delgada with Pedro Almeida Maia (see related entry below) (October)
Guest lecturer, Fresno State, Professor Diniz Borges’ class on Azorean Literature, presented “Becoming Azorean American: A Diasporic Journey,” (lecture). (October)
“António Melo Sousa, Letras de canções e outros rascunhos – uma apreciação” (review) published in Grotta: Arquipélago de Escritores, #6. (November)
Recorded an episode of “Solo Creatives of the Berkshires” for CTSB-TV, Community Television for the Southern Berkshires, presenting and reading from several of my books. (November)
“Get ‘Hygge’ With It: Cozy Spots and Comfort Food in the Berkshires” (article) published in Berkshire Magazine. (December)
“Seeking My Roots Through a Painter’s Eyes” (essay) published in Revista Islenha, Issue 73, in Madeira, Portugal. (December)
Habitar: um ecopoema, Margarida Vale de Gato’s translation of my book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, gets mention in Paula Perfeito’s Entre-Vistas blog. (27 December)
What a year! I am exceedingly grateful to everyone who has supported my writing over the past year. As Walter Lowenfels wrote, “One reader is a miracle; two, a mass movement.”
Like I said last year, I feel like I’ve been blessed by a mass miracle this year!
My Year in Writing: 2019
December 9, 2019
Now is the time of year when I take stock of my writing over the past twelve months.
Here is “My Year in Writing: 2019”:
–FALLING UP: A Memoir of Second Chances published by Homebound Publications in September 2019; book launch party on 10 November in Brooklyn; included on Book Authority’s Best New Family Books list
–DWELLING: an ecotour, including readings in Berkeley, Diamond Springs, and Sacramento, CA, Philadelphia and New Hope, PA, NYC, and at the ASLE Biennial Conference at UC Davis, where I also moderated a panel called “Poetry Can Save the Earth”
-Essay, “Whitman & the Sea,” published in Schuylkill Valley Journal in print and online
-Poem, “Cândido Rondon Remembering Teddy Roosevelt,” published in The Esthetic Apostle
-Revisions to and progress on my #WIP, a research-driven memoir I’m calling THE OTHERS IN ME: A Journey to Discover Ancestry, Identity, and Lost Heritage
-Started a long poem, “Azorean Suite,” a section of which will appear in the upcoming edition of Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal, in my original English and in a Portuguese translation by Azorean poet, José Francisco Costa
-Essay, “My Pessoa,” to appear in Pessoa Plural next June
-Wrote introduction to David Swartz’s English translation of Nuno Júdice’s novella, THE RELIGIOUS MANTLE, which will be published in 2020 by New Meridian Arts
…all in all, not a bad writing year!
FALLING UP Makes List of 30 Best New Family Books To Read in 2020
December 1, 2019
I’m delighted to announce that my latest book, Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances, made it to BookAuthority’s Best New Family Books
As featured on CNN, Forbes, and Inc., BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition. Thank you for all your support!
The book is available for purchase on Amazon and direct from the publisher Homebound Publications.
Special thanks to Heidi N. Moore for nominating my book to this list.
Today is Pub Day for my new book, FALLING UP: A Memoir of Second Chances
September 10, 2019
“Steve Jobs is dead,” I said.
So begins my new book, Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances, which drops today from Homebound Publications as part of their Little Bound Book Essay Series.
When I spoke those words, I was speaking to an audience at the SXSW Eco festival on the morning of 5 October 2011. Jobs had just died and many in the crowd had not heard the news. He was fifty six.
“Fifty-six,” I write in the book. “As I stood on the stage that October morning in 2011, a couple of years shy of fifty myself, I couldn’t help thinking–as perhaps many in the room were thinking, too, in the wake of the example of Jobs–what have I done with my life?”
(You can read more from the opening of the book here.)
Falling Up, my most personal book to date, tells the story of several “second chances” I’ve had in my life, starting with a fall at Letchworth Gorge as a teenager in upstate New York through my most recent change of life, leaving EY after my job was eliminated despite the successful launch of a global technology-as-a-service solution that I led.
Along the way, I explore my original second chance in the wake of that fall in the gorge, my pursuit of art and writing throughout my life, learning to experience nature through the eyes of my children, as well as the story of several entrepreneurial endeavors–successes and failures–and, finally, how I found real and lasting love late in life and learned to embrace it.
Falling Up is about the struggle to become authentic, vulnerable, purpose-driven man in the 21st century and, ultimately, about making one’s dream a reality.
Mark Tercek, the former CEO of The Nature Conservancy–an organization for which I worked over fifteen years and that serves as part of the backdrop for several stories in the memoir–called the book, “An inspiring read for anyone seeking meaning in their work or in their life.”
I hope my little book–only 84 pages and around 10,000 words–lives up to the promise of that advance support and that it helps readers find a way to “fall up” in their own lives.
You can order the book directly from my publisher, Homebound Publications, or through Amazon, and wherever books are sold.
And if you do, please let me know what you think of Falling Up.
Pre-order Your Signed Copy of My Collection of Poems, “Fallow Field”
September 16, 2013
This fall, the Aldrich Press is publishing my long-awaited new collection of poetry, FALLOW FIELD.
The book consists of 45 poems, representing my best work from the past quarter century.
You can order your signed copy of FALLOW FIELD here:
My poetry has received the Nebraska Review Award and the Aldrich Emerging Poets Award, and I have been a Concordia Fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts.
My poems have appeared in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies or online, including the American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Anon, La Petite Zine, Many Mountains Moving, and Terrain, among other publications.
I am also the author of a book of natural history, Walks in Nature’s Empire
The paperback book is 96 pages, including front and back matter, with a gorgeous cover photograph by my good friend Joshua Sheldon (see picture), which was taken at the same time and has the same origin of inspiration as the title poem. (You can read the poem and its story here: “Fallow Field.”)
Here is what others have said about this collection, FALLOW FIELD:
“Scott Edward Anderson’s poems honor the reality that the things of the world – rye grass, fall warblers, ravens, owls, ‘Sargassum drifting/ in a pelagic wave,’ lovers and sourdough bread – speak to and for our innerness. Here the sense of place is not simply a matter of geography, but of feeling one’s way into that sense of becoming that makes one’s path clear. The book’s fourth section is comprised of poems that beautifully embrace the very human need to join the inner and outer, a territory defined, as the poem titles suggest, by ‘Becoming,’ ‘Shapeshifting,’ ‘Cultivating,’ ‘Mapping,’ and ‘Healing.’ Guided since childhood, as the book’s closing long poem relates, by nature’s teaching, Anderson is devoted to finding the words for what it means to dwell mindfully among others on the wounded earth.”
–Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Rope: Poems
“I was impressed by Anderson’s engagement with nature — especially the way in which his lyrical lines sketch the profound relationship between humans and their environment.”
– Jonathan Galassi, author of Left-handed: Poems
“Wow, Pop, I had no idea you wrote so many poems!”
– Walker Anderson, the author’s 10-year-old son
My poetry is rooted in nature and grounded in what Robert Hass called the “strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two.” (Hass, Introduction to Best American Poetry 2001)
I studied with Hass and with Gary Snyder, along with the late Walter Pavlich, and received some great mentoring and advice from poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Donald Hall, Colette Inez, and Karen Swenson, as well as wonderful friends and readers.
My poetry is informed by a deep engagement with the natural world, attuned to the smallest details and complexities of nature and our experience of place. Attentiveness and mindfulness are critical to my method of working, both as the poem first evolves and later, through the often rigorous process of revision.
I believe poetry is the most direct language with which to approach our place in the world and reconnect us to nature. By nature, I mean not only the natural world, but also the built environment; not only the processes and causal powers of the physical world, but our immediate experience of the spiritual and the non-human.
For the past twenty five years, I have been building a body of poetry that tries to achieve my goal of writing that is open, approachable, and eminently readable, at the same time that it is intellectual and revels in the joy of language. FALLOW FIELD represents the best of my poetry over that time.
Order your signed copy of FALLOW FIELD below:
5 Books of Contemporary Poetry I Can’t Live Without
March 23, 2010
Thanks to Peter Semmelhack, who asked for poetry recommendations via Twitter, I made a list of the 5 books of “contemporary” US poetry I can’t live without:
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Donald Hall, Kicking the Leaves
What are the 5 books of poetry you can’t live without?
On How the E-Book Will Change Poetry Publishing & Writing
April 22, 2009
I was reading Steven Johnson’s Wall Street Journal article on “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” Monday morning and began to wonder about how the E-Book will change poetry publishing and writing.
I love books, always have, since I was a little kid and my Aunt Liz gave me a copy of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
I collect books. Not in the way a rare or first edition collector does, although I do have a small group of 1sts, but rather as a collector of, well, books, of literature.
Many of the books have their own stories, especially the books of poetry that line the dozen or more shelves in my living room: where I purchased the book, how I learned about the poet, what I was doing in Berkeley or New York or Paris or India or wherever when I bought it.
Now along comes the Kindle. How will that change the way I read or write poetry? How will affect how I buy poetry? How empty my bookshelves would seem if all my books were in electronic form.
Most of the poetry titles I buy fall into three categories: the latest collection of poems by poets whose work I am interested in (or poets I know); new poets I read about in Poets & Writers or find in a journal; and books I stumble upon either in a used bookstore (less frequent these days) or the local bookstore chain.
One thing I find disturbing about Johnson’s review of the Kindle experience was how he (or any Kindle reader) could suddenly stop reading one book and quickly download another.
While I appreciate that hyperlinks may help illuminate a text or help you learn more about what you are reading, it bothers me that books will never be read the same way again.
(And if hyperlinks are de rigueur in E-Books, can ads be far behind?).
Of course, this can lead, to use Johnson’s own words to, “Entirely new forms of discovery.”
I like what Johnson says about imagining “a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you’ve read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven’t encountered yet.”
This reminds me of my old practice of scanning the Index of biographies of famous poets for the names of writers associated with them. Eliot–>Pound–>Joyce, is one voyage of discovery I remember well.
But this can be taken to the extreme: I’d hate to see an “intelligent” recommendations search incorporated such as they have on Amazon: “Readers who are reading this book are also reading…” Ugh.
I’m intrigued, but also a little concerned about the notion of “a la carte pricing,” which Johnson says “will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music.
“Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes,” suggests Johnson. “The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.”
So, for fiction, we’re looking at the return of the serial. But what about poetry, which may have to devise another pricing scheme, such as “per line” or a minimum purchase per poem.
(And how will poetry fare when it is “competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written”?)
If the Kindle already includes blog or newspaper subscriptions, can journal or individual poet subscriptions be far behind? How about a “Poem-of-the-Month” Club? Anybody game?
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Scott Edward Anderson
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