When Alison Townsend purchased her first house, in south-central Wisconsin, she put down roots where she never imagined settling. To understand how she came to live in the Midwest, she takes a journey through personal landscapes, considering the impact of geography at pivotal moments in her life, vividly illuminating the role of mourning, homesickness, and relocations.

With sparkling, lyrical prose, The Green Hour undulates effortlessly through time like a red-winged blackbird. Inspired by five beloved settings—eastern Pennsylvania, Vermont, California, western Oregon, and the spot atop the Wisconsin hill where she now resides—Townsend considers the role that place plays in shaping the self. She reveals the ways that a fresh perspective or new experience in any environment can incite wonder, build unexpected connections, and provide solace or salvation.

Mesmerizingly attentive to nature—its beauty, its fragility, and its redeeming powers—she asks what it means to live in community with wilderness and to allow our identities to be shaped by our interactions with it: our story as its story.

Alison Townsend’s newest book is a nature-and-place-based memoir-in-essays, The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home. She is also the author of two books of poetry, The Blue Dress, and Persephone in America, which won the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. A collection of short prose, The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water, won the Jeanne Lieby Nonfiction Prize. Her poetry and essays appear widely, in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review, and Under the Sun, and have been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays 2020.Her awards include a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award (for contributions to the literature of the Upper Midwest), and the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize. She’s had residencies at Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Spring Creek Project, and Write On, Door County. She is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she taught creative nonfiction. She and her climate-activist husband live on four acres of prairie and oak savanna in the Wisconsin farm country, the inspiration for The Green Hour.

Marilyn Annucci is the author of The Arrows That Choose Us, winner of the 2018 Press 53 Poetry Book Award. She is on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she teaches a variety of writing courses. Find her at www.marilynannucci.com.

Livestream: Alison Townsend with Marilyn Annucci