The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to welcome you to a special alumna book talk featuring author Amanda Lewis. Amanda is a graduate of the EL&L Honours Program. Current EL&L students with an interest in writing and publishing are especially invited to attend this in-person event.
Join us in Buchanan Tower 323 on Tuesday March 19, 2024 at 3:30 pm. Be sure to register!
About the Author
When she first moved back west after nearly a decade away, Amanda Lewis was an overachieving, burned-out book editor most familiar with trees as dead blocks of paper. A dedicated “indoorswoman,” she could barely tell a birch from a beech. But that didn’t stop her from pledging to visit all of the biggest trees in British Columbia, a Canadian province known for its rugged terrain and gigantic trees.
The “Champion” trees on Lewis’s ambitious list ranged from mighty Western red-cedars to towering arbutus (madrone). They lived on remote islands and at the center of dense forests. The only problem? Well, there were many…
Climate change and a pandemic aside, Lewis’s lack of wilderness experience, the upsetting reality of old-growth logging, the ever-changing nature of trees, and the pressures of her one-year timeframe complicated her quest. Burned out again—and realizing that her “checklist” approach to life might be the problem—Lewis reframed her search for trees to something humbler and more meaningful: getting to know forests in an interconnected way.
Weaving in insights from writers and artists, Lewis uncovers what we’re really after when we pursue the big things—revealing that sometimes it’s the smaller joys, the mindsets we have, and the companions we’re with that make us feel more connected to the natural world