Save the date for the Harris Center’s 2024 Annual Meeting! Join Harris Center staff, trustees, and friends for highlights from the past year, notable recognitions, and a special performance by writer Howard Mansfield and composer Ben Cosgrove.

In a selection from their acclaimed show, A Journey to the White Mountains, Mansfield and Cosgrove will explore how today’s visitors to the White Mountains and other wild places, like the Monadnock Region, come in search of an outdoor paradise. This concept, popularized by 19th-century landscape painters, created a demand for sublime scenery and set the stage for the establishment of national parks across the country. A Journey to the White Mountains was filmed by the Salt Project, shown on New Hampshire and Vermont public television, and has won a New England Emmy Award.

2 to 4 p.m. at the Peterborough Players. Space is limited, and registration is required. For more information, contact Amy Fackelmann.

Writer Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation. He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, The Bones of the Earth, and Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, which the Boston Globe called “a wholly original meditation … that’s part observation of the contemporary built environment, part cultural history, part philosophical account, and at times something like a Whitmanian poetic survey.” His newest book is I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II.

Composer Ben Cosgrove writes landscape-inspired music – a spirited, jazz-inflected piano in the tradition of Keith Jarrett. He has held artist residencies and fellowships with the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, Harvard University, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. He has also written for Orion, Taproot, Northern Woodlands, Appalachia, and other publications. His fourth studio album, The Trouble with Wilderness, an evocation of nature and wildness within the built environment, was released last year. It has been called “beautiful and fascinating” (The Maine Edge), “deeply impressive” (Independent Clauses) and “immediately evocative and fully arresting… brimming with technical mastery and emotional capital” (Seven Days).

Photo stills from the film A Journey to the White Mountains courtesy of the Salt Project.