In Watershed Days, the reader embarks on a wide array of adventures shared in seasonal order over a period of two years, 2005-2007, yet spanning in memory back to the author s youth. Infused with a blend of ruggedness and sensitivity, the writing is ripe, wry, and roving, ever attuned to the natural world. When the focus is not on the immediate homestead activities of making apple butter, telling stories to his child at bedtime, coming to terms with an aging dog, planting fruit trees, building garden beds, stacking firewood, butchering hogs, keeping chickens, hunting deer behind the barn, Moeckel zooms in on his escapes to the near woods and rivers, creeks and coasts surfing, canoeing, fishing, even skateboarding on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The twenty-four adventures are woven into a subtle, cohesive whole, providing a textured portrait of a young man, his family, and their evolving intimacy and distance with each other and the natural world, the 18-acre homestead to which they have just moved and started working, as well as the woods and rivers of Virginia s Jefferson National Forest just down Arcadia Road.

Watershed Days

Literature & Fiction

Moeckel, Thorpe

Essays & Correspondence

Mercer University Press

On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and "wonder the woods." In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing--lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness--invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase.
Reading this book is like trying to grasp a live fish or to study the seeds of a jewelweed pod the moment they unfurl: joyful, exhilarating, wakeful, wise, and riddled with each moment's loss. It orients by disorienting, because how else, Moeckel asks, can being in such an altered, changing, resilient place feel.
Here are upwellings from the interior Piedmont. Here is an eco-psychological lingua terra, an Anthropocene pilgrimage, a chronicle of presence, and presence's peregrinations. Here, most of all, is an experience in attention to place, the events of the seasonal, day-to-day flora and fauna of the Carolina Piedmont. Here we reside in the space where one thought has ended and another has not yet begun, where one way of life has ended and another is still being dreamed.
Those who love good writing and/or nature will love Thorpe Moeckel's exploration in this Wonder Almanac.

Down by the Eno Down by the Ha

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

MELTLINES collects 19 poems rooted in the topography of the Canadian Northwest and Alaska, from the winner of the 2001 Gerald Cable First Book Award (for ODD BOTANY). A deluxe chapbook-style volume with a color cover featuring the author's own freehand map of the region.

Meltlines: Poems

Van Doren Company

“Part orison, part ecstatic vision, part post-Lapsarian psalm, Venison turns the act of dressing/blessing a buck into rumination on 'the red path' of laboring, bloodshed, making, and the search for meaning that marks the human fall from paradise into time.”— Lisa Russ Spaar
Food doesn’t get any more local, cosmic, primitive, tasty, or disturbing than in this book-length, lyrical-meditative poem. At stake are no less than the origins and mysteries of flesh and touch.
Thorpe Moeckel teaches at Hollins University and is the author of two books of poems—Odd Botany and Making a Map of the River.

Venison

Poetry

Etruscan Press

Thorpe Moeckel's trilogy of long poems are as rich, lush, and organic as the soil of his Virginia Blue Ridge homestead. In a mode both contemporary and as old as Hesiod, Moeckel sustains a cosmic and earthbound incursion into essential techniques and textures of life.

Arcadia Road: A Trilogy

In Making a Map of the River, award-winning poet Thorpe Moeckel focuses his rueful, tender attention on the spectrum of being--family, work, play, nature, home--sometimes all at once. The river in question is not just the Chattooga or its colorful, conflicted, rain chasing paddlers and guides. The river is consciousness itself, and Moeckel navigates the rapids and pools of memory and presence and language, layering moments of recognition and realization with painterly details and silty tonalities that embody the paradoxes of living in and representing the natural world. Lavish and austere, this is a book that lingers long on the tongue and eye and ear. It will fascinate readers who know the Chattooga and readers who don't--and will delight anyone who wishes to get closer to life's complexity, beauty, folly, and joy.

Making a Map of the River

Iris Pr

In Making a Map of the River, award-winning poet Thorpe Moeckel focuses his rueful, tender attention on the spectrum of being-family, work, play, nature, home--sometimes all at once. The river in question is not just the Chattooga or its colorful, conflicted, rain chasing paddlers and guides. The river is consciousness itself, and Moeckel navigates the rapids and pools of memory and presence and language, layering moments of recognition and realization with painterly details and silty tonalities that embody the paradoxes of living in and representing the natural world. Lavish and austere, this is a book that lingers long on the tongue and eye and ear. It will fascinate readers who know the Chattooga and readers who don't--and will delight anyone who wishes to get closer to life's complexity, beauty, folly, and joy.

Iris Press

Poetry. "Thorpe Moeckel takes in the gorgeous, complex natural world that surrounds us, and which we too often ignore. He adds our goofy and often-painful culture. And then he shows us that language is capable of a more expressive response to these things than most of us ever thought possible."—David Young "Thorpe Moeckel is litanist, pilgrim, sensualist, beseecher, explorer, and connoisseur of the heart's underbrush and waterways. ODD BOTANY gives us a language of plentitude and paradox that's 'rambunctious on the tongue'—pop-culturally savvy, intensely lyric, and capable of an incomparably delicate tensility."—Lisa Russ Spaar

Odd Botany

Silverfish Review Press

<div>Lucinda Mae lives with her family and their homestead animals in Painter Creek Hollow, a secluded nook of the Blue Ridge Escarpment in upstate South Carolina that people call the Gorges.&nbsp;The story explores the lifeways of rural mountain families who remain tied to traditional ways of living, such as raising hogs, poultry, hunting squirrels, and using local plants for medicine, among others. The winter holiday season, the warming earth, and the ways misunderstanding and prejudice can harm&nbsp;relationships between friends and between generations are also themes in the novel.</div>

True as True Can Be

Teen & Young Adult

Green Writers Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moeckel, Thorpe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moeckel, Thorpe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moeckel, Thorpe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Watershed Days

Down by the Eno Down by the Ha

Meltlines: Poems

Venison

Arcadia Road: A Trilogy

Making a Map of the River

Making a Map of the River

Odd Botany

True as True Can Be