Selected Interviews & Press

On reawakening animal instinct and excavating awe; A conversation with Vanessa Chakour

Erica Berry: How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world growing up? You allow yourself such a wonderful sense of play in the natural world as an adult, and I was thinking about how, for so many people, that’s a thing we grow out of, if we are ever lucky to experience it at all.

Vanessa Chakour: As a child, I was incredibly lucky to have a woodland conservation area at the end of our backyard in Western Massachusetts. I spent countless hours playing alone in those woods, conversing with the forest and searching for hidden treasures or answers to my unending existential questions…

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Psychology Today

“Every now and again, a new book comes along that can truly be a game-changer. Nature advocate, former pro-boxer, and rewilding facilitator Vanessa Chakour’s Earthly Bodies: Embracing Animal Nature is one of them. In it, she draws parallels from her own struggles “to our unease of feeling like prey; challenging the entrapment of our limiting beliefs; contextualizing the turmoil of fractured landscapes; and affirming our primal ache to belong.”

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Interview on Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe

“What are you reading now?
It's rare not to have a number of books going at once. I've almost finished Splinters, a gorgeous memoir by Leslie Jamison. My current stack also includes The Land in Our Bones by Layla K. Feghali, an important book about land-based medicine in the SWANA region, and Settling Nature by Irus Braverman who writes about “settler ecologies” and “dispossession through protection”. I'm also reading Feasting Wild, by Gina Rae La Cerva. Her exploration of wild food, particularly the reality that “eating remains the closest, most consistent relationship we have to nature,” resonates with me as a student of land who shares ethical foraging and wildcrafting.”

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