Charlotte Gill spent 20 years working as a treeplanter in the forests of Canada.During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clearcuts, treeplanters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers. In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance, while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging’s environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts. Eating Dirt also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, which grow from a tiny seed into one of the world’s largest organisms, our slowest-growing renewable resource.Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees. “With this book, Charlotte Gill has fitted a key piece, long missing from the story of West Coast logging. What happens after these wild landscapes have been stripped of trees is an important, if painful topic, and it is hard to imagine a writer (and treeplanter!) better qualified than Gill to tell this story of death and rebirth in the woods. In the same spare, unflinching prose that brought her such acclaim for her short story collection Ladykiller, Gill takes us into the remote and rarely seen world of the treeplanter, immersing us in the unique combination of sweat, fog, heartache and humor that distinguishes it from all other labors.” — John Valliant, author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce.Gill is the author of the story collection Ladykiller, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and winner of the Danuta Gleed Award and the B.C. Book Prize for fiction. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, the Journey Prize Stories, and many Canadian magazines and has been broadcast on CBC Radio.Her narrative nonfiction has been nominated for Western and National Magazine Awards. Gill spent nearly two decades working in the forests of Canada and has planted more than a million trees.Gill speak about her book Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. at the Courtenay Library. She will read from Eating Dirt, provide a brief PowerPoint presentation about the tree-planting process, and participate in a Q&A following the reading. Books will be available for signing..— D&M Publishers Inc.

Comox Valley Record