About Leila
Leila Philip is the author of award-winning books of nonfiction that chronicle diverse, personal journeys. In The Road Through Miyama, Leila, already fluent in Japanese and a potter, traveled to Japan to apprentice to a master potter in southern Kyushu. A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, took her much closer to home (literally), and weaves the history of the Hudson valley farm where she spent her childhood with a revealing account of what’s involved in cultivating orchards. Both books received awards, and glowing national reviews. A Guggenheim Fellow, Leila has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She works across genres, publishing poetry, essays and theatrical script and is currently at work on a documentary film. She was a contributing columnist at the Boston Globe and teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at the College of the Holy Cross where she is a professor in the English Department.
Why I Wrote Beaverland
I write to know about the world and my place in it. I write to better understand and connect with worlds, ideas and realities that are not my own. I research and document and observe as rigorously as I can, then I sit down at my desk and try to make sense of all that I have taken in. For me, writing is always a journey with a wonderfully uncertain end; I write to discover what I don’t know yet. I strive to find the story, then shape that story with words and share. We live in a time of ongoing environmental crisis and fear is an appropriate response once we acknowledge the extent to which we have altered every aspect of life on earth. But so is hope. In writing Beaverland I discovered the natural wonder of beavers and the powerful ways they restore damaged environments. Beavers demonstrate the incredible powers of resilience and healing available to us as concrete solutions to help us meet the urgent challenges of climate change. Beavers can teach us. We can learn.
Fun Facts
Before entering Princeton University, where she majored in East Asian Studies and comparative literature, Leila wrote for a local newspaper in Hudson, NY, starting a features series on local color, like the baker on lower Warren who had been delighting kids with her birthday cakes for as long as anyone could remember.
Later that year, she headed west, spending several months working the lambing season on a sheep ranch in Coos Bay, Oregon. This was followed by a stint in the Oregon mountains with a tree planting cooperative, where, by planting trees for the forest service, Leila earned enough to pay for her first semester of college. She was drawn back to Oregon by its amazing natural beauty. Although she didn’t meet any beavers back then, she did get to know a group of cheetahs quite well – throughout much of college, she worked summers as a cheetah ranger outside of Roseburg.
Leila currently lives in Woodstock, Connecticut where, surrounded by trees, she has learned to love the beauty of living in a woodland.
