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VZ Book Group – Madder: A memoir in weeds

April 10th
5:00pm - 6:00pm

The Village Zendo Book Group

will discuss

Madder: 
A memoir in weeds
by Marco Seiryu Wilkinson
The Village Zendo book group will meet to discuss Madder: a memoir in weeds, by VZ sangha member Marco Seiryu Wilkinson. Seiryu will join us for the discussion.  All are welcome!

Madder, matter, mater—a weed, a state of mind, a material, a meaning, a mother. Essayist and horticulturist Marco Wilkinson searches for the roots of his own selfhood among family myths and memories.

“My life, these weeds.” Marco Wilkinson uses his deep knowledge of undervalued plants, mainly weeds—invisible yet ubiquitous, unwanted yet abundant, out-of-place yet flourishing—as both structure and metaphor in these intimate vignettes. Madder combines poetic meditations on nature, immigration, queer sensuality, and willful forgetting with recollections of Wilkinson’s Rhode Island childhood and glimpses of his maternal family’s life in Uruguay. The son of a fierce, hard-working mother who tried to erase even the memory of his absent father from their lives, Wilkinson investigates his heritage with a mixture of anger and empathy as he wrestles with the ambiguity of his own history. Using a verdant iconography rich with wordplay and symbolism, Wilkinson offers a mesmerizing portrait of cultivating belonging in an uprooted world.

Marco Seiryū Wilkinson has been a horticulturist, a farmer, and an editor. He currently teaches creative writing at University of California, San Diego and Antioch University’s MFA program, and has taught horticulture, sustainable agriculture, and wild food foraging in Ohio and Southern California. He has been the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Award for Individual Excellence and fellowships from the Hemera Foundation, Craigardan, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Madder: A Memoir in Weeds is his first book. He has been practicing with the Village Zendo since 1999.

Join the discussion on April 10th, 5pm

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