E621 - Deborah Lee Luskin - Hunting for Your Next Great Read - Reviving Artemis - The Making of a Huntress

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EPISODE 621 - Deborah Lee Luskin - Hunting for Your Next Great Read - Reviving Artemis - The Making of a Huntress

Deborah Lee Luskin earned a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University and expected to become an academic, not a deer hunter. She moved from New York City to Vermont for the summer in 1984, fell in love with the landscape, the community, and the new doctor in town. Forty years later, she’s still in Vermont, where she’s raised daughters, taught, and—always—wrote.

Luskin’s novel, Into the Wilderness (White River Press, 2010) a love story set against the backdrop of Vermont’s political sea-change in 1964, won the Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Regional Fiction and praise from the Vermont Library Association for its “sense of place.”

Luskin started her career in print, penning her first professional column from France while in high school. Her work has since appeared in newspapers and magazines; been broadcast on public radio; and sent into cyberspace in blogs.

Luskin spent more than thirty-five years driving all over Vermont, delivering literature-based humanities programs for the Vermont Humanities Council to parenting teens, new adult readers, educators, life-long learners, healthcare workers, and prison inmates. She has lectured widely and taught countless writing workshops. Since 2016, Luskin has been facilitating the on-going Rosefire Writing Circle, a place to write in community and with support.

Engaged in civic life, Luskin practiced restorative justice as a volunteer at the Brattleboro Community Justice Center and served as the elected Town Moderator in Newfane, Vermont.

All along, Luskin grew vegetables, kept bees, and stuck to well-marked trails through the woods. She knew how to read a text closely, slaughter chickens, and can tomatoes, but she didn’t know how to read the untracked forest that dominates the Green Mountain State. Until she was sixty, she was scared of getting lost in the woods. Then she heard a call from the universe that the deer could teach her how to read the untracked landscape. Reviving Artemis: Becoming a Huntress tells the story of how she learned to navigate through the forest of her fears and find her place in the natural world.

Finding a Place in the Natural World
Reviving Artemis is the unlikely story of a woman raised in mid-twentieth-century suburbia, then lived in New York City as a young adult, and moved to Vermont in 1984. For more than thirty years, she raised domestic livestock, kept bees, and cultivated fruits and vegetables while teaching literature and telling stories. But when she turned sixty, something shifted. Luskin was overtaken by a primal urge to step out of the garden, off the blazed trails, and into untracked forest by learning to hunt deer.

Deeply personal, lyrically told, and funny, Reviving Artemis reveals Luskin’s ambivalence about guns and her fear of entering the forest alone in the dark. She persisted, using her literary acumen to read the forest and, as thoughtfully as she hunts for words, to hunt for deer. With the stories of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, childbirth, and wild nature to inspire her, Luskin became a huntress determined to age fiercely and compelled to tell this story of finding her place in the natural world.

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