Would you like to work with professional interviewers/writers to capture the stories of:

• your family history, including its relation to land?
• the story of your connection to a vineyard and winery?
• your feelings about your house, farm, lodge, or outdoor club?

- We can create an Environmental Memoir for You

We are interested in stories about how people feel and act toward land, landscape, and ecological communities. We like to discover, with you, the ways that you have practiced living within nature. We want to know about your emotional ties to home places, shorelines, forests, lakes, vineyards, and wineries. Our hope is to record ways in which you and your group have become more knowledgeable, creative, and responsible toward landscapes, over time. We would like to facilitate your effort to leave this environmental memoir in the hands of the next generation. Eva and I will help you frame your stories so that your children, or the next generation of your group's members, will appreciate the past and see what needs to be done.

- A Privately Published Environmental Memoir can Archive your Memories, Feelings, and Photographs of a Beloved Place

We can help you capture themes in your memories of landscapes.

Sometimes a person wishes to save a personal or family story, of the history of a winery, farm, home place, or forest for a small, select audience. Sometimes the goal is to archive these valued stories not with the idea of selling to a market, but to create a book or a CD recording to give away. These make wonderful heritage gifts for family members, or members of your organization.

- How the Process Works

My partner Eva Gordon and I work with you to record your stories. We discuss your goals and materials, such as family documents and photographs. Then we record several hours of interviews about the history of your project. This process is fun, and it brings to light the story threads, or themes, in your memories that you'd like to highlight in your environmental memoir.

After listening carefully, we find a voice which pleases you, in which to tell your stories. Then we write a draft, give it to you for comments and suggestions, and we revise the text. We format the final draft, with photographs if desired, and work with a professional designer on a cover which pleases you. All this work will be created in a digital file from which a printer can produce your book. We see the process through—until the book is in your hands.

The result can be a small press run of a book printed to very high standards of cover, stitching, and archival paper; or a it can be an inexpensive but quality paperback available in print-on-demand form. Our project with you can include an archival CD of the interview recordings, professionally mixed. These make fine, inexpensive gifts.

- About Private Memoir Publishing

First, traditional publishing aims for a commercial market. The publisher takes the financial risk, the editor provides independent revision and endorsement, and the writer tries to craft his or her stories in a manner that will have wide appeal to strangers. Luke has published nine award-winning books with traditional publishers, including Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture, edited by Eva Gordon.

Second, self-publishing of memoirs is also meant for a commercial market, but eliminates the editor; the writer endeavors to market the books himself or herself. It is a large business today, but not one in which we work.

Third, there is Private Publishing. This is appropriate to produce a limited number of books for free, or for members of a group to purchase. In this case, the goal of the writing and editing process is different—it is aimed at the market you choose and define, and you are not under the same kind of pressure as if you were pleasing large groups of strangers. We love this form, with its freedom from commercial pressures, and its worthwhile goal of helping you create your environmental memoir.

In Private Publishing, printing can involve top-of-the-line leather binding and archival paper, or trade paperback quality materials. It can involve traditional printing, with a small press run, or digital print-on-demand technology (POD). With POD, individual books are printed from a computer as they are ordered, so there is no expense of printing and storing many copies. Copies may be purchased at a wholesale price, at any time in the future, as long as the POD publisher remains in business.

Sometimes people confuse print-on-demand printing technology with self-publishing. One is a printing process, the other is a business process.

- We Guide your Project all the way from Interviews to the Books and CDs in your Hands

Eva and I work with people who wish to capture their memories, stories, and feelings in order to have us create books and CDs through Private Publishing. We conduct interviews, then do the writing, editing, photo organizing, formatting the book, bringing in a cover designer, and seeing your project through the complete printing process, at the level of printing quality you choose. In some cases our names might be on the book in an "as told to" or some other manner, and in other cases our names will not appear at all.

- Our Backgrounds for Work on the Environmental Memoirs

When Luke was a boy, hunting and fishing in the Tombigbee River bottom with his friends, he believed in the great American idea of wilderness. He would go to sleep at night thinking of how he could next get down into the Big Woods, ten miles south on the graveled river road, where bucks and bobcats and giant cypresses and oaks lived and whispered in mysterious and holy quiet.

Later in life, Luke earned graduate degrees in Writing, Environmental Planning, and Philosophy, and wrote nine award-winning books for children, young adults, and adults. His most recent book is Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture, which contains environmental memoir ("Sharing Sacred Ground" and "River of Silence"), environmental biography and history (the essays on John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and on the role of metaphors in American understandings of nature).

Luke managed farms and forests, and consulted on conservation projects in France, New England, and the American Southeast. These included for-profit, non-profit, private, and governmental projects. As Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Luke taught graduate courses in Documentary Writing and Science Journalism. As Senior Research Associate for 10 years at the Center for Policy Analysis, Luke advised on environmental aspects of a variety of planning efforts. As a faculty member for eight years in Spalding University's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program (2001-present), Luke has mentored students in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, and Writing for Children and Young Adults. Many of their projects were memoirs or based on memoirs.

While teaching as a Fulbright Professor in Dublin, Ireland, Luke participated as a guest faculty member in a Ph.D. seminar in Cultural Geography, led by scholar Anne Buttimer. From this experience Luke and Anne co-edited Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, which collects essays from nearly 20 countries on the meanings of landscapes.

When Eva was growing up she lived with the family in coastal Rhode Island, and in France and Ireland. In recent years she's lived in Italy and Australia, and in Chicago and New York. She feels deep ties to both rural and urban landscapes, and enjoys working with clients to help them capture their "life and land" stories.

- Get Started on Your Environmental Memoirs

To discuss your ideas about archiving your stories and feelings about land and life, in a process leading to a privately published environmental memoir, and to learn more about how we can help, contact us at stories@lukewallin.com, or threebuckwoods@yahoo.com.