Quillwood Academy
Quillwood Academy was founded by scholar and educator Eric Garza to help people make sense of, and navigate, today’s many converging crises. A small selection of these crises might include inequality, pollution, rising rates of chronic illness and infertility, resource depletion, political dysfunction, and global warming. Some of these crises operate predominantly within our social sphere. We treat others as largely environmental issues. Many straddle these realms, emerging from one to impact the other. These crises form a web of entangled causality that envelopes our world and defines the experience of growing numbers of people. The better we understand these crises and their interrelatedness, the greater our capacity to respond with thoughtfulness and compassion.
Quillwood events provide structured, supportive online spaces for participants to explore a variety of topics and skillsets and to meet and interact with people from around the world who share their interests and concerns. Quillwood facilitators weave multiple layers of pedagogy into each meeting. At a surface level, information is presented that can help participants better understand how the world works, how things came to be the way they are, and what the future might hold. At a deeper level, facilitators model how to discuss complex and sometimes triggering topics so as to promote understanding and compassion, all while contending with ideological and cultural differences. Facilitators also model the importance of staying present with others, allowing people to show up as the messy, grief-stricken, anxiety-riddled people many of us are.
Check out the events page to see what learning opportunities Quillwood Academy is currently offering, and sign up for Quillwood’s newsletter to learn about new events when they are announced.
Eric Garza
Eric lives in Vermont’s Champlain Valley, in the Northeastern United States. He spends much of his time pondering today’s predicaments, often while wandering Vermont’s forests and fields. This pondering lends itself well to a career in education; in addition to facilitating events through Quillwood Academy Eric is also a part-time lecturer at the University of Vermont. He occasionally teaches at other colleges and universities as well.
Eric grew up amusing himself outdoors for sizable portions of the day. This unstructured time acquainted him with the many plants and animals he shared his suburban landscape with, while also kindling an interest in subsistence practices. After finishing high school Eric studied ecology and evolution for his undergraduate degree, graduating from one of Purdue University’s extension campuses in 2001. After working for the United States Geological Survey for a few years he pursued graduate studies at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, completing dual masters in Environmental Science and Public Affairs in 2006. He then moved East to study ecological economics, earning his PhD from the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School for Environment and Natural Resources in 2011.
Aside from his academic studies Eric has spent the better part of his adult life training in various martial arts and contemplative traditions. He began his martial training in the late 1990s, and has studied both eastern and western systems. He began his contemplative training in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, then trained for several years within the Kwan Um School of Zen under guiding teacher Zen Master Soeng Hyang. Soon after finishing college Eric began exploring place-based living skills, among them foraging for wild edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms, fishing, hunting, tracking and landscape interpretation, and crafting useful tools from gathered materials. Today these three skillsets—martial, contemplative, subsistence—form the basis of Eric’s approach to navigating our uncertain future.
For those who are curious about Eric’s heritage, his father, from whom he inherits his surname, was born in Mexico. He immigrated with his family to the United States in the late 1940s. Eric’s paternal grandfather was Basque, while his grandmother had mixed Spanish and Indigenous ancestry. Eric inherits his light skin tone from his mother, who was of primarily Scottish and Irish descent. Most of her ancestors immigrated to North America in the years following the Irish Potato Famine.
Find a selection of Eric’s interviews below.
- How Are We To Live In The… Traumacene?, on The Poetry of Predicament with Dean Walker
- Traumacene, With Eric Garza, on The Stoa
- Eric Garza On Death, on Eugene Kim’s On Death podcast
- Running the Numbers on Local Vs. Long Distance Food, on Vermont Public Radio (June 2014)
For The Curious
The name “Quillwood” originated from one of Eric’s bow hunting excursions in northern Vermont several years ago. While walking through a grove of beech trees he saw a cluster of what appeared to be mushrooms growing on an old rotting log on the ground. He did not recognize the species, so wandered over for a closer look.
Each of the individual mushrooms consisted of a very thin stalk with no cap. Most were only an inch or two tall. They were predominantly white, with a dab of black at their base where they emerged from the rotting wood.
Curious, Eric reached down to pluck one of the stems. Upon doing this, its stiffness and texture revealed that these were not mushrooms at all. They were porcupine quills!
Upon stepping back and surveying the area, Eric realized that a porcupine likely fell from a beech branch overhead, landed on its back or side, and embedded dozens of its quills in the rotting wood and the mossy ground around it. Eric saw no evidence of the animal’s demise, so assumed it shook the fall off and waddled off into the forest in that peculiar way that porcupines do.
Eric felt inspired to name Quillwood Academy after this experience because it illustrates a pattern worth noting: he saw something novel—a bed of porcupine quills embedded in rotting wood on the ground—and rather than perceiving clearly what he was seeing he instead misidentified it as something more commonplace—a cluster of mushrooms he did not recognize. That initial, inaccurate impression became his reality until his sensory experience led him to a more accurate explanation.
In this case the mistake was innocuous. Misidentifying those porcupine quills had no impact on anyone. We cannot always count on our errors to be free of consequence, though. There is value in honing our capacity to make sense of what we are seeing, and to avoid holding on to common interpretations so tightly that emerging evidence is unable to lead us towards more accurate interpretations. When we fail to make accurate sense of things, it is easy for us to gravitate to responses that not only fail to address the issues at hand, but might exacerbate them in unfortunate and even terrifying ways.
