Watch the Video
This presentation will be given by Merilyn Simonds, the internationally published author of 20 books, including the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Among her best-selling nonfiction is A New Leaf, the story of her gardens north of Kingston, and Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, a meditation on reading, writing, and the future of the printed book.
Her most recent work—Woman, Watching (2022)—is an innovative memoir/biography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, an extraordinary recluse who changed the way we see birds. You can learn more about her work at http://merilynsimonds.com.
Through the 1940s and early 1950s, amateur ornithologist and nature writer Louise de Kiriline Lawrence tracked the sharp decline in warblers and flycatchers in her northern Ontario wilderness and linked it to the roadside spraying of toxic chemicals—a decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sounded the same alarm.
Louise was not the only eccentric women tramping the bush to watch birds. In her free-spirited love of Nature, her strong opinions about humans, and her indomitable, ingenious resourcefulness, Louise was part of a lineage of self-taught women bird watchers and writers that stretches back two hundred years. A pioneering self-trained naturalist, interested in the relationship between humans and the natural environment, she was part of a female force that was instrumental in transforming ornithology—human thinking about birds—from an exercise in naming, categorizing, and exploiting into narratives that combined fact and interpretation in a way that opened the avian world to anyone who could read.
Born into Swedish aristocracy and imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, Louise emigrated to Canada in 1926, setting up a Red Cross Outpost in northern Ontario, where she later became nurse-in-charge of the famous Dionne Quintuplets. Disturbed by the media circus around the infants, she built a log cabin in the wilderness and spent the next 50 years studying birdlife and writing almost a hundred articles and six books about species whose populations were diminishing before her eyes.