About
Photo credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
My husband and I are a modern-day rendition of Lisa and Oliver Douglas of the sitcom Green Acres renown. Replace Lisa’s New York City with Providence, Rhode Island; Hootersville with Jaffrey, New Hampshire; and Green Acres with Darwin’s View, and you have us. The difference? Carl and I live during the Anthropocene age, a human-made epoch.
Thus, we named our home Darwin’s View with intention: “survival of the fittest”, “natural selection”, “evolution”.
We moved from Providence to Jaffrey in December of 2012 to live off-grid with our two cats, Nick and Nora; and Big Red and his five hens. Just for a few months, to make sure our newly built, off-grid, weekend cabin wouldn’t freeze its pipes. You might remember that winter. Blizzards-of-the-century every other day?
With nothing better to do than watch the snow fly, wonder what I was doing there, and read really depressing books on our species’ fallout on the world, I declared war against climate change.
That conflict rapidly morphed into a two-front war against Demo-n-Capitalism. But, as winter turned to spring, summer, fall, and another winter, it became clear that I wasn’t having much effect. No surprise. I had gotten distracted, busy with other things. Like how to flap one’s wings while chasing a cricket, or atrophy into corpse pose in a dusty area of the driveway. Or to plant, not bury, a seed, which requires one to give that seed a drop or two of water.
A word from the semi-wise: it is much easier to write about chickens and their life dramas, and one’s own life on a New Hampshire homestead, than about the consequences of Homo sapiens’ alienation from Mother Nature.
Hate and fear, greed and selfishness? War is a symptom, not the cause. I almost lost my war against climate change and Demo-n-Capitalism because they are so unutterably depressing and overwhelming. I have learned that to survive them, we must go back to what connects us.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— Maxims for Revolutionists, George Bernard Shaw
Official Bio
Tory McCagg earned a M.F.A. from Emerson College’s writing program in 1989, where her thesis and novel, Shards, won the Graduate Dean’s Award. Among other accolades, in 1999, “Roots”, an early chapter from her novel Bittersweet Manor was a semifinalist in the New Millennium awards VIII contest; Bittersweet Manor won a Silver medal for Contemporary Fiction from Independent Publishers in 2015. Her memoir, At Crossroads with Chickens: A “What If It Works?” Adventure in Off-Grid Living and Quest for Home came out in June 2020, just in time for the pandemic. Instead of the planned road trip, Tory marched across the driveway to the hen house for The All Cooped Up Book Tour. Tory lives with her husband and myriad chickens at Darwin’s View where they all practice an experimental life off-grid and on the land.
