Wild Things | An Evening with Barbara Wansbrough & Paul Holdengraber

Join us for a moving conversation with Barbara Wansbrough as she discusses , her luminous and deeply intimate book of letters written after the loss of her beloved sister. Guided by daily walks through Griffith Park, Barbara’s reflections on nature, grief, memory, and transformation unfold with clarity and grace. In dialogue with moderator Paul Holdengraber, she explores how sorrow reshapes us—and how the natural world can lead us gently toward healing.

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"These trees, these plants I have written to you about have taught me all I needed to know about your death." B loves M, her favorite sister.

Then M is gone--taken too young, too suddenly, under the strange and quiet shroud of the pandemic. In the absence that follows, B sets out each day into the vast wilds of Griffith Park with her dog, walking uphill and down in search of understanding, of peace, of reconciliation.

She talks to her sister in the language of the landscape, sports with her in the shape-shifting form of the wild animals
and plants of the park--rabbits, coyotes, snakes, owls, oleander, dodder, nettle, walnut. She leaves gifts--shells, stones, tokens of memory--and finds them answered in unexpected ways.

B now finds herself open to the mystery of change--willing to release old habits, weary truths, impossible expectations, and the comforting fictions of family. She revisits her life as an anxious and dutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, and artist,
pausing to linger, to glance sideways, to laugh. She walks onward, guiding us gently toward a place we all must reach--where much can be left behind and a new wisdom awaits. And then she writes.

Wild Things is the result: 59 letters to her sister, one for each year of her life, alive with grief, wonder, and transformation. A book about loss and about the radical clarity that comes when everything falls away--a luminous, unforgettable work.

Barbara Wansbrough's love of movies came from London, where she worked at Midnight Films/Specific Films as a development executive (U2: Rattle&Hum and Priscilla, Queenof the Desert) to Los Angeles in 1992, where her first job was on RobertAltman’s Short Cuts. She went on to become Jessica Lange’s development executiveat Prairie Films, followed by script reading/editing for Propaganda Films,Gramercy Pictures, Polygram Films and 20th Century Fox. Following ascreenwriting assignment for Roman Polanski (The Guilty), Barbara worked as a setdecorator in music videos, commercials and TV. In 2004, she left LA for New York,where she spent fourteen years working as a freelance writer/editor on various onlinepublications; an events curator (Brooklyn Public Library) and raising twochildren. In 2018, Barbara returned to Los Angeles, where she began to write in earnest:She hopes to serve as an inspiration to any fellow late-bloomers out there.Wild Things: A Geography of Grief is her first published work.

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