Very excited for my new book “Listening to the Bees” co-authored with poet Renee Sarojini Saklikar.
CBC: 12 Poetic Works to Discover in 2018
B.C. Bestseller list, 4 weeks May/June 2018
“Read of the Year,” Glasgow Review of Books, 2018
46 Coolest Summer Reads, Globe and Mail, 2018
“KPU Reads”, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 2019
Gold Medal, Independent Publishers Book Award, Environment/Ecology, 2019
Talks
Listening to the Bees: Mark Winston, a naturalist, scientist and author of the Governor General’s Literary Nonfiction Award-winning book, Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive, has joined forces with celebrated poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar. This talk, and the book, grew from their common passion for bees, an exploration of the intricate ways we come to understand our world through language and through science. In Listening to the Bees Winston will talk about his experiences over 40 years of walking into apiaries, and the lessons learned from a life spent among the bees.
“Listening to the bees connects us to the ineffable mysteries we will never resolve or fully understand. As a scientist, I find it oddly satisfying that data and studies can only take us so far, that there is a realm where there are no answers, only wonder at how little we can know.”
–Mark Winston
Jacket Copy
Listening to the Bees is a collaborative exploration by two writers focusing their shared interests in bees to illuminate the most profound human questions: Who are we? Who do we want to be in the world?
Through their distinct but complementary lenses of science and poetry, Mark L. Winston and Renée Sarojini Saklikar take readers into the laboratory and out to the field, viewing the devastation wrought by over-management of agricultural and urban habitats, imploring us to listen to the bees as we depend on them for our own survival and prosperity. Winston provides an insider’s view of the way research is really conducted—along with personal and surprising insights—while Saklikar responds to his rich scientific archives through poems interspersed throughout the book. The result is a marvelous journey into a deeper understanding of science, culture and language.
Quotes and Reviews
Winston’s insights are thought-provoking but not heavy handed, interspersed with Saklikar’s poems, which serve as staccato accents to the book’s contemplative hum. The book is easy to dip into, like a jar of honey on the breakfast table, but something about it sticks long after the page is turned. Ivan Semeniuk, Toronto Globe and Mail, 16 June 2018
In this collaboration . . . we’re steered away from any narrow preconception of science as sterile, jargon-based, and impersonal, and encouraged to listen to its cultural, social, philosophical, and even spiritual insights . . . Both disciplines rely on curiosity, questioning, perception, resonance . . . Like bees building a comb and filling it with the sweetness of survival, science and poetry are about process, possibility, taking things forward. But first, you have to listen closely. Focus Magazine July/August 2018
In its collaborative approach and unique focus on the natural world, “Listening to the Bees” . . . is one-of-a-kind. Winston and Saklikar have created something special here. 49th Shelf
An exploration of the intricate ways we come to understand our world through language and science. Munro’s Books May 2018
There is nothing better than art that makes us question who we are and who we want to be. This excellent book, an exciting fusion of art and science, offers readers an incredible learning experience as it guides them on a journey set to change their culture irrevocably, provided we are willing to listen to the bees. Nexus May 2018
In “Listening to the Bees,” Mark Winston and Renée Sarojini Saklikar have given us a new way of looking at bees – increasingly the bellwethers in our ecologically challenged world – which incorporates the hard rationality of science and the spiritual aestheticism of poetry in a delicate, artful, sui generis blending that is perfectly extraordinary. P.W. Bridgman, Glasgow Review of Books 2018
Beyond science and poetry, there is ethical insight and spiritual wisdom to be found in “Listening to the Bees.” Ormsby Review, 24 January 2019, Michael Picard