Hannah Stowe and Bathsheba Demuth join us virtually for a conversation about Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea (Tin House Books).
"The shelves are awash with sea books. But Stowe is different. She doesn’t just watch and describe the sea; she’s part of it. It surges inside her and crashes out onto the page. The book’s drenched with salt water. It fizzes, clicks, booms and screams. Tremendous." — Charles Foster, author of Being a Human
This event will be streamed on Zoom.
About Move Like Water
A book to sweep you away from the shore, into a wild world of water, whale, storm, and starlight— to experience what it’s like to sail for weeks at a time with life set to a new rhythm.
As a young girl, Hannah Stowe was raised at the tide’s edge on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales, falling asleep to the sweep of the lighthouse beam. Now in her midtwenties, working as a marine biologist and sailor, Stowe draws on her professional experiences sailing tens of thousands of miles in the North Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic Sea, and the Caribbean to explore the human relationship with wild waters. Why is it, she asks, that she and so many others have been drawn to life at sea—and what might the water around us be able to teach us?
Braiding her powerful and deeply personal narrative and illustrations with stories of six keystone marine creatures—the fire crow, sperm whale, wandering albatross, humpback whale, shearwater, and the barnacle—Stowe invites readers to fall in love, as she has, with the sea and those that call it home, and to discover the majesty, wonder, and vulnerability of the underwater world.
For fans of Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard, Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea is an inspiring, heartfelt hymn to the sea, a testament to finding and following a dream, and an unforgettable introduction to a deeply gifted nature writer of a new generation.
About the participants
Hannah Stowe is the author of the debut memoir Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea. She lives in Dresden, Germany, writing, painting, and sailing her own boat named Larry.
Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian at Brown University, specializing in the United States and Russia, and in the history of energy and past climates. She has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America.
