The USFWS Library is excited to announce our book for fall 2022's Wild Read! Every season for America’s Wild Read for USFWS employees (others should visit their local library), and host a virtual book discussion via Zoom open to both employees and the public. This fall we are reading Immersion the Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels by Abbie Gascho Landis. Every creek and river has its story, and many of these are bound to mussels. This lyrical piece of nature writing celebrates the world under the water's surface and invites us to play a part in it.
Abbie Gascho Landis is a writer, veterinarian, and naturalist who prefers spending her free time with her family playing in the creek, searching for mussels, and training her eye to distinguish one mussel species from another. Landis holds a bachelor's degree in English and biology from Goshen College and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Ohio State University. Her writing has been published in Pinchpenny Press, Full Grown People, and Paste.
Immersion is an invitation to see rivers from a mussel’s perspective, a celebration of the wild lives visible to those who learn to search. Mussels have much to teach us about the health of our watersheds if we step into the creek and take a closer look at their lives. Landis brings readers to a hotbed of mussel diversity, the American Southeast, to seek mussels where they eat, procreate, and, too often, perish. She worries what vanishing mussels—70% of North American species are imperiled—will mean for humans and wildlife alike. In Immersion, she shares this journey, traveling from perilous river surveys to dry streambeds and into laboratories where endangered mussels are raised one precious life at a time.
If you’d like to join us, FWS employees can access an eBook of Immersion via this link. You can also email catherine_blalack@fws.gov to borrow a print copy as available. For the general public, Immersion can be found at your local library or book store. If you want to learn more about America’s Wild Read and how to participate email catherine_blalack@fws.gov.
Come join us on Wednesday, November 9, 3 p.m. ET, aswe host a book discussion on Immersion the Science and Mystery of Freshwater Mussels by Abbie Gascho Landis – more information to follow. At our book club meetings, we have cultivated a casual atmosphere where we reflect on the reading, answer discussion questions, and enjoy some time together through a conversation on conservation literature.
Brought to you by the USFWS Library, America’s Wild Read is a virtual book club where we aim to inspire you to connect with the outdoors and nature through literature. We hope you will read along with us as we feature various conservation books every quarter — contemporary, traditional, new, and classic.
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