The Get Outside Book Club is the place build community around books and authors with connections to the natural world in Sonoma County.  Seasonally, we’ll gather on a preserve stewarded by LandPaths in Sonoma County to discuss a work that connects with the region – memoir, graphic novels, cleverly written field guides, fiction – in conversation with the book’s author. That’s right! We’ll be joined by the author of the selected works, who will answer your questions, share insider tips from their writing, and participate in the discussion! Plus, we’ll have special guests (LandPaths’ staff and volunteers) who will speak to the ecologies of the place, depending on the book’s subject matter.  

We are so excited to introduce the first book in the series: The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin. We chose to open the series with Manjula's book because A) It's a fabulous read B) The book takes place in Sonoma County during the Walbridge and Glass fires of 2020. Riddell Preserve was burned in the Walbridge fire and this is a chance to discuss the book in a place that brings the story to life through lived experience. 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER! 

And please contact us if the sliding scale cost is difficult for you to pay. We would love to offer scholarships so anyone who wants to come out for this special event is able to, regardless of cost! 

Find The Last Fire Season at the Sonoma County Library or order through Copperfield's Books or Bookshop. 

More about The Last Fire Season: When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods, she wanted to be closer to the landscapes she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a bodily crisis—a series of botched reproductive health procedures had left her with chronic pain. Martin found a sense of healing in tending a garden amid the magnificent redwoods of Sonoma County, but the ecosystems that she treasured were, like her body, in crisis. Fueled by climate change, wildfires were growing exponentially more destructive. In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous fires across the Western US and kicked off an unprecedented fire season, Martin, along with thousands of others, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic.

Both a love letter to the landscapes of the American West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that shaped them, The Last Fire Season follows Martin from the oak woodlands of Sonoma County to the redwood groves of coastal Santa Cruz to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada as she seeks shelter and tries to better understand fire’s elemental roles in ecology and culture.

As she explores the majestic landscapes of the North American West, she also seeks understanding of the landscapes and narratives of her own body. In order to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, Martin must confront and reframe her own presumptions about the relationships among people, the systems we create, land, and home—ultimately unearthing new possibilities for inhabiting beauty, pain, grief, joy, and care in the natural world.

“Powerful . . . This isn’t a hand-wringing chronicle of climate despair. Nor is it a can-do narrative buoyed by inspirational hash tags and techno-optimistic hopes. Martin’s book is at once more grounded and more surprising . . . the range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination.”
—The New York Times

 MANJULA MARTIN is coauthor, with her father, Orin Martin, of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Cut, Pacific Standard, Modern Farmer, and Hazlitt. She edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living; was managing editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story; and has worked in varied editorial capacities in the nonprofit and publishing sectors. She lives in West Sonoma County, California.

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