Witness to Change: Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell

Wednesday, February 8th, 2023 at 6pm: Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell (2010) with Dr. Christopher Schaberg, environmental humanities scholar.

The Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses and the Gallier Gatherings Lecture Series is pleased to host the LEH Currents reading and discussion series, Witness to Change: Community Conversations of Coastal Impacts in the Winter and Spring of 2023! The book to be discussed on February 8th is Mike Tidwell’s, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. The conversation will take place at the Gallier House (1132 Royal Street, New Orleans) and be led by environmental humanities scholar Dr. Christopher Schaberg, Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans.

Registration is free and includes a copy of Bayou Farewell. Participants may register for multiple LEH Currents events: please use the following link to find out more about the other nights: https://fb.me/e/3Opwl7O3K.

Space and available books are capped at 20 for each discussion, so please be sure to register ASAP.

After you complete your registration here on Eventbrite, follow the emailed instructions to activate your registration and receive your free book. If registration is full, interested participants may also sign up for the waitlist—any registrations not activated by a week before the discussion night will be released to the waitlist at that time, and any uncollected books will be distributed on a first-come-first-served basis after that point.

About the book and the author:

Mike Tidwell, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. Vintage Books, 2010.

The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell—as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico.

Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author’s travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

Mike Tidwell is a journalist and travel writer, who has received the Society of American Travel Writers’ Lowell Thomas Award for travel journalism four times. In 2003 he received the Audubon Naturalist Society’s Conservation Award.

About Dr. Christopher Schaberg:

Christopher Schaberg—Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans—is the author of eight books on contemporary American literature, the culture of air travel, and environmental awareness. His new book, out in March 2023, is Fly-Fishing.

About Witness to Change: Community Conversations on Coastal Impacts:

Every human being has a relationship with water. It forms our bodies, drives our commerce, and defines many of the places we live. Since civilization began, people have attempted to control water—keeping it close, but in its place. But what happens when the relationship with water changes? How do we react when the sea rises, when land is lost, and when flooding affects our homes?

Witness to Change: Community Conversations on Coastal Impacts offers a place to have these conversations. This adult reading and discussion program, led by scholars, offers participants the opportunity to learn more about issues arising from the complex and changing human relationship with water. See how these issues are both local and global and join your neighbors in an exploration of how others are adapting to our changing world.

Currents is a program of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and is made possible by the State of Louisiana.

Host or Publisher Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses