We are excited to welcome Sheila McEntee for a reading and book signing. Sheila’s book, Soul Friend and Other Love Notes to the Natural World, is a meditative collection of essays about nature and being human, to be released May 15 by Blackwater Press. 

In Soul Friend and Other Love Notes to the Natural World, author and naturalist Sheila McEntee artfully conveys her deep love of the natural world and the solace she finds there. In twelve brief personal essays, spanning 20 years, she explores the flora and fauna in Appalachian forests, on the shores of the Potomac River, and, especially, in her own backyard, as she navigates the joys and trials of an introspective life: love, loss, death, loneliness, intimacy, uncertainty, and, ultimately, self-knowing and self-acceptance. In this small volume, we learn that nature teaches resiliency, and to be present to it is to find joy. Indeed, there is no heartache or struggle for which it does not offer comfort.

Sheila McEntee is a writer, editor, and naturalist. Her work has appeared in Stonecrop Review, The Brevity Blog, Still: The Journal, Woods Reader, and on West Virginia Public Radio. She was editor of Wonderful West Virginia from 2006 to 2014 and wrote for the magazine for many years. A Holy Cross graduate, she grew up in Maryland and Massachusetts and now lives in Charleston, WV.