Avid Bookshop is pleased to host a book signing with Mark Warren, the author of Two Winters in a Tipi: My Search for the Soul of the Forest, on June 7, 2012, Thursday, at 6:30 pm.
One August night, while Mark Warren and his dog, Elly, were sleeping at the summer camp he runs, a lightning bolt from a late-summer storm struck his tin-roofed mountain farmhouse, reducing everything he owned to ashes. Even his metal tools melted. The devastating call came the next day: “Your house burned down.” Truck, guitar, knife, raincoat, a stack of field guides, and the clothes on his back—these were all his worldly possessions now. Friends loaned him a tent, but after just a month it began to break down—which Warren vowed not to do. “I should be living in a tipi,” he decided. Excitement stirred in his chest, and so began a two-year adventure of struggle, contemplation, achievement, and reward that brought him even closer to the land that he called home, a word that took on new meaning. More than just the story of one man, Two Winters in a Tipi gives the history and use of the native structure, providing valuable advice, through Warren’s trial and error, about the parade of confrontations that march toward a tipi dweller. It shows, without thumping the drum of environmental doom, how you can in fact go back to the land—for two days or two years. The wild plants that Natives harvested for food, medicine, and craft are still out there, waiting to be rediscovered. The foods are still healthy; the medicines still work. As Warren reveals, the wild places of the past still exist in our everyday lives, and living that wilderness is still a possibility. It’s as close as the river corridor running through your city, the wooded lot on the outskirts of your neighborhood, or even the edges of your own backyard.
Mark Warren graduated Phi Beta Kappa in chemistry from the University of Georgia and pursued a career in music while working as a naturalist and educator for the Georgia Conservancy. The National Wildlife Federation named him Georgia’s Conservation Educator of the Year. His articles on nature and survival skills have appeared in the North Georgia Journal, Georgia Backroads, and Blue Ridge Highlander. A U.S. national champion in whitewater canoeing and a winner of the World Championship Longbow Tournament, Warren founded and runs the Medicine Bow Wilderness School in the North Georgia mountains, where he lives.
