Skip to content

Finding Your Walden: How to Strive Less, Minimize More, & Embrace What Matters Most

A Book Talk with Jen Tota McGivney

Register to Attend In-Person

The hero for our time is someone few people get right. Thoreau wasn’t a hermit in the woods. He lived during a time like ours, of rapid technological and economic changes, political division, and a pandemic. Thoreau, like us, reassessed his priorities: What does success really look like? What is my duty as an ethical citizen of a less-than-ethical world? How can I live a good life amid (insert hand-sweeping gesture) all of this? His solution: Pare down to trade up.
In Finding Your Walden, Jen Tota McGivney invites everyone—both serious Thoreau fans and the merely Thoreau-curious—to learn how five of Walden’s messages can make life a little easier and a little happier today:

1. Know the True Cost of Things
2. Create Space Between You and the World
3. Embrace Your Inner Misfit
4. Know What You Work For
5. Spend Life Lavishly

Join Jen as she shares her new book, as well as her mission to put a little less striving and a little more Thoreau into modern life.

Jen Tota McGivney is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina. She’s the back-page columnist for Charlotte Magazine, and her work also appears in Simplify Magazine, SUCCESS Magazine, and Southern Living, among others. She has a master’s degree in English and a soft spot for the transcendentalists. Finding Your Walden is her first book.

blank Co-sponsored by the Walden Woods Project.

We are delighted to also offer this program on Zoom. Please register here to join us virtually.

Register to Attend Virtually

  • 00

    days

  • 00

    hours

  • 00

    minutes

  • 00

    seconds

Date

Nov 09 2025

Time

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

More Info

Register

Location

Thoreau Farm
341 Virginia Road, Concord MA 01742
Register

The Thoreau Society Bulletin is a 20-page newsletter with bibliographic information and writings on the life, works, and legacy of Henry Thoreau.

Each issue features news, upcoming events, and announcements from the Society, along with original short articles on new discoveries in and about the world of Thoreau, his contemporaries and related topics. It also contains a Notes & Queries section and a President’s Column, as well as additions to the Thoreau Bibliography and reviews of new literature relevant to the field. Edited by Brent Ranalli.

The Thoreau Society Bulletin is mailed to each member on a quarterly basis as a benefit of membership.

Membership includes a subscription to the annual journal.

BECOME A MEMBER

The Concord Saunterer is a valuable aid to studies of Thoreau.” — Harold Bloom, Yale University

The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies is an annual peer-reviewed journal of Thoreau scholarship that features in-depth essays about Thoreau, his times and his contemporaries, and his influence today. Membership includes a subscription to the annual journal.

BECOME A MEMBER

Get news from the Thoreau Society and learn about ways you can help preserve Thoreau Country as part of our common heritage and as the embodiment of Thoreau’s landmark contributions to social, political, and environmental thought.

The Thoreau Society®, Inc.
341 Virginia Road, Concord, MA 01742
P: (978) 369-5310
F: (978) 369-5382
E:  info@thoreausociety.org

Educating people about the life, works, and legacy of Henry David Thoreau, challenging all to live a deliberate, considered life—since 1941.

blank
blank
blank

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Back To Top