Writing Wild Talk

An hour long talk

This book has been adapted into an acclaimed narrative designed for speakers’ series at botanical gardens, museums, libraries, universities, and garden clubs. A lively and intelligent portrait of women and nature in the wider changing culture, like other talks by Kathryn Aalto, Writing Wild is visually rich with a soundscape that transports people to different worlds. The journey begins with a climb up England’s tallest mountain following in the 1818 footsteps of Dorothy Wordsworth, the lesser-known diarist, poet, and inspirational sister of William Wordsworth. Moving to America where Susan Fenimore Cooper, America’s first nature writer, lived and wrote, audiences learn about barriers that “dame scribblers” faced in nineteenth-century publishing.

The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh

An hour long talk

A. A. Milne’s classic stories Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner have delighted parents and children for nearly a century.  The real landscape that inspired Milne and his illustrator E. H. Shepard was Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, an area of outstanding natural beauty. Part travelogue and natural history, this talk weaves history with humor, and birdsong with booklore. Kathryn Aalto tells the story of the real places and the rare flora and fauna in the forest that inspired Milne to create the Hundred Acre Wood, arguably the most beloved setting in children’s literature. Learn about Milne’s extraordinary childhood and remarkable writing career as well as his creative partnership with Shepard that captured generations of readers. Leave with a new understanding of how the Winnie-the-Pooh books are field guides for 21st-century Christopher Robins — hymns to those days of doing nothing yet learning everything.

Writing Workshops

An hour long talk