Woodsqueer : Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life

Woodsqueer is sometimes used to describe the mindset of a person who has taken to the wild for an extended period of time. Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences not just making a living but making a life-in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine. Building a home with her partner, Ruth, on their farm means learning to live with solitude, endless trees, and the wild animals the couple come to welcome as family. Whether trying to outsmart their goats, calculating how much firewood they need for the winter, or bartering with neighbors for goods and services, they hone life skills brought with them (carpentry, tracking and hunting wild game) and others they learn along the way (animal husbandry, vegetable gardening, woodcutting). Legler\u27s story, at times humbling and at other times amusing, is an homage to agrarian American life echoing the back-to-the-land movement popularized in the mid-twentieth century -- Provided by publisherhttps://scholarworks.umf.maine.edu/publications/1092/thumbnail.jp