Here is Where I Walk: Episodes From a Life in the Forest

by Leslie Carol Roberts

It is in the Presidio of San Francisco, California, that Leslie Carol Roberts walks. The Presidio, America’s only residential national park tucked wholly into an urban setting, is a fading historic forest. Here is where Leslie’s memories of other places, people, and travels emerge. Here is where the author’s home has been for more than a decade, and here is the place she raised her two children as a single mother.

In layered stories of her life and travels, Leslie turns her daily walks into revelations of deeper meaning. From Maryland to Iowa to Tasmania, we follow a fierce and keenly observant walker through places of exquisite beauty and complexity. Her daily walks inspire Leslie to accept the invitation of the beckoning trees where she finds herself colliding with the urban coyote, the peculiar banana slug, and the manzanita. She also notes both ridiculous and poignant aspects of human ecosystems in pursuit of what it means to live a life of creativity and creation from scientist-activists battling to save environments to the tragic realities of ordinary life.

In this finely crafted eco-memoir, each place provides Leslie with exactly the scaffolding needed to survive, with nature serving as the tonic. Here is Where I Walk provides a vivid answer to how we can find our place, not only in nature but within ourselves and the world we walk.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature

200 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2019

About the author

Leslie Carol Roberts, author of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: VIEWS ON ANTARCTICA, (OCT. 2008, Nebraska) has travelled to Antarctica three times and researched the continent for two decades. She was the first Fulbright Fellow in Antarctic Studies in the world and has delivered talks and papers on her interdisciplinary work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, the New Zealand Studies Association (London) as well as to scientific groups and at universities in the U.S. and abroad. Roberts, MFA, Iowa; MA, Canterbury, has written hundreds of articles and essays for magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, including the Bellevue Literary Review, the Iowa Review online, the Bangkok Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2009, she will be the distinguished writer in residence at St. Marys College in Moraga, California, and she is currently an adjunct professor in the MFA programs in writing and graduate design at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.
"

Reviews

[Lane Igoudin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her walks in Presidio, a San Francisco military base recently converted into a park and public space, Leslie Roberts finds worlds within worlds within worlds, echoing John Symmes's Theory of the Hollow World, which is one of her book's many diversions. But diversions, meditative breaks from the linear, are precisely the point here: the invaluable experiences that nature, and woods in particular, can bring us. Plants, animals, and spaces between them can guide us on extensive walks into history, literature, sociology, botany, geology, and just about any field of exploration. They can also open paths to our own nature, just as Roberts – an eco-essayist, a Fullbright scholar, and a California College of the Arts professor – illustrates by relating her walks to the episodes in her nomadic life.

For an environmental writer, it is hard not to get lost in lamenting the ongoing destruction of nature, the losses it – and we – have suffered. Roberts, in contrast, is fascinated with the histories, the cultures living organisms embody, and the transformations they can bring within a person. Her sense of wonder permeates the book. “I think of the wild, and how it inhabits urban spaces, as image, memory, park, as a place for art to show ideas of our larger situation” (33).

For an observant, skillful writer like Roberts, Presidio – a damp, craggy, mysterious forest, preserved despite all odds among extreme urbanization – provides a fertile site for both inquiry and introspection, and for a lovely book.

[Carole Duff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-structured hybrid of nature writing and memoir. Beautifully-written prose reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I lost the thread a bit in the middle but found it again when the author returned to the Presidio where she lives and walks.

[Barb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this immensely— dare I say more than I expected? It’s a nature book, history, a personal journey and part memoir. A calming reflection for a chaotic world. Thank you Leslie!