Soil and Spirit - Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.  
Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective—as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.
“Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”—words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness—Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.

List of contents

Contents
PROLOGUE: A GOLDEN FLEDGED GROWTH  
Chapter 1: INEXHAUSTABLE WAYS OF SEEING
Chapter 2: TONGUES IN TREES, BOOKS IN THE RUNNING BROOKS 
Chapter 3: A CARE FOR WORDS  
Chapter 4: IN THE SEASON OF GRAIN RAIN  
Chapter 5: OLDER THAN THOUGHT  
Chapter 6: CULTURA  
Chapter 7: A STRONG SONG  
Chapter 8: JUANA’S ORANGE, ELENA’S RED 
Chapter 9: THE REMEMBERED EARTH  
Chapter 10: GRAINS OF A GREAT WEB 
Chapter 11: THE MOUNTING SAP  
CHAPTER 12 FILTERES OF THE EARTH 
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements  

About the author

Scott Chaskey is the author of Soil and Spirit. He is also the author of a memoir, This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, and a book of nonfiction, Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds. His poetry, first printed in literary journals in the early seventies, has been widely published over four decades. A pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, for thirty years he cultivated more than sixty crops for the Peconic Land Trust at Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York, one of the original CSAs in the country. He is past president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, and was honored as Farmer of the Year in 2013. He was a founding board member for both the Center for Whole Communities, in Vermont, and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, in Shelter Island, New York. He taught as a poet-in-the-schools for over two decades, and as an instructor for Antioch International and Friends World College in Southampton. Chaskey lives and works on the east end of Long Island, New York.

Summary

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy human communities.  

Along the way, even while planning rotations of fields, ordering seeds, tending to crops and their ecosystems, Chaskey was writing. And in this lively collection of essays, he explores the evolution of his perspective—as a farmer and as a poet. Tracing the first stage in his development back to a homestead in Maine, on the ancestral lands of the Abenaki, he recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. He describes cycling across Ireland, a surprise meeting with Seamus Heaney, and, later, farming in Cornwall’s ancient landscape of granite, bramble, and windswept trees. He travels to China for an international conference on Community Supported Agriculture, reading ancient wilderness poetry along the way, and then on to the pueblo of Santa Clara in New Mexico, where he joins a group of Indigenous women harvesting amaranth seeds. Closer to home on the Southfork of Long Island, he describes planting redwood saplings and writing verse under the canopy of an American beech.

“Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic”—words that describe his prose as well as his vision of connectedness—Scott Chaskey has given us a book for our time. A seed of hope and regeneration.

Foreword

• Digital galley campaign, with DRCs available for major media, nonfiction media, gardening and farming media; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
• Major media outreach, positioning this as a meditative, beautifully written book about an important social and agriculture movement, as well as how to live a nourished life
• Indie Next campaign, with bookseller outreach focused on the NAIBA region
• Advertising with NAIBA and other regions with concentrated CSA communities
• Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts
• Academic outreach to seed book in classrooms that have taught BRAIDING SWEETGRASS
• Reader’s Guide available for download
• Major launch in New York, with touring in collaboration with CSAs across the U.S.

Product details

• Authors: Scott Chaskey
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 10.03.2023
• EAN: 9781571311979
• ISBN: 978-1-57131-197-9
• No. of pages: 304
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Nature, technology > Nature: general, reference works; LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays, GARDENING / Essays & Narratives, GARDENING / Organic, Agriculture and farming, GARDENING / Urban & Community