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Writing Off the Grid: What Can Nature Teach Us About Bearing Hardship?

  • L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, Riverview Room 400 Eau Claire Street Eau Claire, WI, 54701 United States (map)

Carol Dunbar

If you weren’t able to join us for Dunbar’s live event or are interested in watching it again, click below to watch the recording.


There is more help available to us in this world than we know. The study of biomimicry looks to nature for solutions because every problem known to man has already been solved by Mother Earth. In her debut novel, The Net Beneath Us, author Carol Dunbar looks to the trees to see what they can teach us about bearing loss. Building on the groundbreaking work of German biologist Peter Wohlleben and her personal experiences living deep in the woods, Dunbar will share the true story behind the writing of her first book and why, in all her novels, she looks to nature to find what it can teach us about becoming better human beings.

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CAROL DUNBAR is a working writer and former actor, playwright, and coloratura soprano who left her life in the city to live off the grid. Her debut novel, The Net Beneath Us, won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was a finalist for the Midland Society of Authors book awards. Her second novel, A Winter’s Rime, releases in the fall of 2023. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The South Carolina Review, and on Wisconsin Public Radio. She writes from a solar-powered office on the second floor of a water tower where she lives in a house in the woods with her husband, two kids, and a giant Alaskan malamute.

Learn more about Carol Dunbar at caroldunbar.com.