Visiting the Yew Mountain Center in West Virginia (2023)

In March of 2023, I traveled with my family to West Virginia to lead a listening session based on my long-term project Forest Listening Rooms. Read more below. For a full account, visit my Substack newsletter Sound Is Magic here.

 At the end of March, I spent a few days in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I was invited (along with my wife Jen and son Henry) to the Yew Mountain Center, a botanical sanctuary and community center in the Appalachian mountains. While there, my job was to share my experiences with the Forest Listening Room project with local residents to see if it might contribute to their own community organizing efforts around history and place. (You can learn more about the Forest Listening Rooms project here.)

Lately, I’ve been increasingly curious to see how Forest Listening Rooms works outside of its original contexts (which are the communities and places of the Wayne National Forest in Appalachian Ohio, where I have worked for the past thirteen years). Would it work elsewhere? Would new communities find it of use and meaningful? Here, Pocahontas County was a place I had never been to, and home to a community I had never met. I knew from the beginning I had to rely on their generosity and knowledge to make Forest Listening Rooms work.