ReadUP 2025: Wild: The Book

 ReadUP website

By November 15: Fill out this form to reserve a copy of Wild.

Starting November 21: If you reserved a copy, it's time to pick up your book! Students living in residence halls can pick up the book from their hall director. For everyone else, books can be picked up at the Clark Library service desk during open hours.

eBook copies are also available for reading the book on your phone, tablet, or other device.

Thursday, March 13, 2025

Schoenfeldt Distinguished Visiting Writers Series presents Cheryl Strayed

7:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Buckley Center Auditorium

Free

"Traces the personal crisis the author endured after the death of her mother and a painful divorce, which prompted her ambition to undertake a dangerous 1,100-mile solo hike that both drove her to rock bottom and helped her to heal."

Saturday, February 8

Screening of the movie adaptation of Wild.

7p.m., Brian Doyle Auditorium, Dundon-Berchtold Hall

Wednesday, February 19

Fr. Pat Hannon reflects on his recent Pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

7 p.m., Brian Doyle Auditorium, Dundon-Berchtold Hall

Saturday, February 22

Join the Garaventa Center for a hike along the Wildwood Trail in Forest Park.

Time: TBD

“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.”

“I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I'd wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again. Her death had obliterated that. It had obliterated me. It had cut me short at the very height of my youthful arrogance. It had forced me to instantly grow up and forgive her every motherly fault at the same time that it kept me forever a child, my life both ended and begun in that premature place where we'd left off. She was my mother, but I was motherless. I was trapped by her, but utterly alone. She would always be the empty bowl that no one could full. I'd have to fill it myself again and again and again.”

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
"It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”