#WigtownWednesdays | Katherine May ~ 24 Feb 2021
Katherine May ~ Wintering
Wednesday 24 February
7pm, via Zoom
SIGN UP FOR FREE HERE
BUY THE BOOK HERE
How do you survive the winterings of your life? Katherine May talks to us about her recent book, Wintering, and the power of rest and retreat in difficult times.
Wintering is a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves. Katherine May thoughtfully shows us how to come through these times with the wisdom of knowing that, like the seasons, our winters and summers are the ebb and flow of life. She shares her own year of wintering, and how she found strength and inspiration when life felt frozen.
She explores the themes of illness, loss, grief, shame, career changes and parenting guilt whilst also travelling to the likes of Norway and Iceland in pursuit of winter, to interview locals that have themselves wintered in extreme ways.
By the end of Wintering you see how it also brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience. Wintering shows how the healing nature of the great outdoors helps us overcome and embrace our own wintering experiences, and how, much like nature, we can learn to appreciate these low periods, and what they have to teach us, before the ushering in of a new season. Wintering is a beautiful love letter to the cyclical nature of our lives and shows us how to embrace those moments where we drop out of life and hibernate for a while.
About the author: Katherine May lives by the sea in Whitstable and is an avid lover of the outdoors. She lives and breathes everything the natural world has to offer and is compelled by how the wild and extreme landscapes can benefit our mental and emotional wellbeing. She is the author of The Electricity of Every Living Thing, a memoir about her walk in the wilds as she came to terms with an Asperger's diagnosis. Her personal wintering experiences have taught her what it means to be different and how we can all learn to make peace within our own unquiet minds. Katherine has written for The Times, Stylist, Aeon, Good Housekeeping and Psychologies, and has been a regular pundit on BBC Radio London. Katherine is an advocate for the glory of the cold - snow, icy landscapes, the northern lights, winter landscapes and most particularly cold-water swimming (she swims in the sea at Whitstable all year round).