Reservoir Year: A Walker's Book of Days

by Nina Shengold

Overview

On the eve of her sixtieth birthday, Nina Shengold embarks on a challenge: to walk the path surrounding the Catskills' glorious Ashokan Reservoir every day for a year, at all times of day and in all kinds of weather, trying to find something new every time. Armed with lively curiosity, infectious enthusiasm, and renewed stubbornness, she hits the path every day with all five senses wide open, searching for details that glint. As Shengold explores the secrets of this spectacular place, she rediscovers the glories of solitude and an expanded community, both human and animal. Step by step, her reservoir walks rekindle connections with family, strangers, and friends, with a landscape she grows to revere, and with a new sense of self. Like the writings of John Burroughs, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, Shengold's reflections on her personal journey will resonate with outdoor enthusiasts and armchair hikers alike. Quietly transformative, Reservoir Year encourages readers to find their own ways to unplug and slow down, reconnecting with nature, reviving old passions and sparking some new ones along the path.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815611240
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2020
Series:	New York State Series
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Nina Shengold is an award-winning author, playwright, and screenwriter. Her debut novel Clearcut was a Book Sense notable selection, won a Henry Miller Award from nerve.com, and appeared on Year's Best lists in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, San Francisco Bay Times, Out.com (#1 selection) and BookMarks. Shengold's River of Words: Portraits of Hudson Valley Writers was an IPPY Award Silver Medalist. Shengold has also won the Writers Guild Award and a GLAAD Award nomination for her Lifetime teleplay Labor of Love, starring Marcia Gay Harden.

Interviews

Encourages readers to find their own ways to unplug and slow down, reconnect with nature, rekindle old passions and spark some new ones along the path.

Editorial Reviews

Reservoir Year is a comforting yet thought-provoking meditation on the human relationship with the natural world and how a connection with nature can deepen our awareness and empathy, no matter where we are in life.

Literary Ladies Guide

The book is an invitation to find our own 'Ashokan Reservoir,' a place of magic that will engage our senses and awaken our spirit.

Art in the Catskills

A portrait of place and time and a rich meditation on existence, precisely because she doesn't try to make it that way but allows it to unfold.

Bluestone Press

To walk with Shengold along the banks of the Ashokan Reservoir, is to see the Catskills-its ever-changing sky, its magnificent wildlife, and even its ghosts-through the lens of a writer of rare and exquisite sensibility.

author of The Quarry Fox: And Other Critters o Leslie T. Sharpe

Reservoir Year is both a lyrical form of devotion as well as halcyon cry to wake up and notice the life around us. A most timely and superb book!

author of The Ashokan Way: Landscape’s P Gail Straub

Shengold's memoir explores a reservoir of feelings. Accompanied by her elegant, unpretentious prose, the reader comes upon surprises: a bear, an eagle feather, a crimson forest. Filled to the brim with subtle revelations, of sun-washed illuminations but also the poignant history; a drowned town lies below the shimmering surface. Expect to be moved, and then overcome by the tenderness and variety of Shengold's emotional literary palette.

author of Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Laura Shaine Cunningham

For a walking companion with a witty, curious and unorthodox mind who is also a stunningly good writer, read Nina Shengold's Reservoir Year. I loved loved loved every word and then I cried at the end.

New York Times bestselling author of A Three Dog L Abigail Thomas

Part ode to this pristine environment and part interior monologue on aging, friendship, and love, Shengold's book inspires readers to pay a little more attention to the beauty of the world and how it can reflect their emotions right back at them.

Upstate House Magazine

Shengold's beautifully calibrated rhythm of language conveys all the rhythm of walking-the quiet, graceful stride along with lively, animated steps, the contemplative solitary strolls and those shared with companions. But she offers us as well the rhythm of the infinitesimal and the grand; of the expected and the unexpected; of the abstract and the real. Shengold suggests what it is to be an attentive human being, which is why accompanying her on these reservoir walks is as restorative as the walks themselves.

author of How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibil Akiko Busch

This is nature writing of the highest and most delightful order.

coauthor of The Prayer Wheel: A Daily Guide to David Van Biema

Reservoir Year is both a lyrical form of devotion as well as halcyon cry to wake up and notice the life around us. A most timely and superb book!

author of The Ashokan Way: Landscape’s P Gail Straub