NELP - a Reason to be Hopeful for the Future

This year, the English Department’s New England Literature Program (NELP) celebrated its 50th year of rustic, place-based learning as 40 students and 13 U-M instructors lived, studied, and worked together in the woods of New England. They read New England authors like Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Morgan Talty; they produced book-length journals; and they explored the landscape that inspired so many literary works. Classes met on mountaintops and docks, in village commons, around campfires and cookpots, in lean-tos, and under the stars. NELP-ers gave up personal technology for the duration of the program, handwriting all their work and making all their own music—continuing a 50-year experiment in deliberate living that Thoreau himself could appreciate.