Guin Library: Guin Reads Book Club

Dive into great books with Guin Reads!
The book club of the Marilyn Potts Guin Library (at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, OR). Everyone’s welcome, email us to join the club! hmsc.library@oregonstate.edu

Link to this guide: beav.es/guin-reads

• Topic: Part 1: "Planting Sweetgrass"
• When: 1:00pm, Wednesday, Oct. 1st, 2025
• Hybrid location: Guin Library's Seminar Room and via Zoom (email hmsc.library@oregonstate.edu for link).
• "Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand  across years and generations. Its favored habitat is sunny, well-watered meadows. It thrives along disturbed edges."
  • As you read this section, consider how you were planted in this place. For many of us, we were planted, rooted first into Hatfield. But we have other roots, as well. Roots in the coast, in research, in Oregon. We thrive, collectively, as we navigate disturbances together. 
  • Bring your reflections, bring your questions. We look forward to seeing you at our first meetup! 

Braiding sweetgrass : indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

"As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return." - https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass (publisher)