Join us for a reading and conversation with Madison-area poet Krissy Kludt and Montana-based essayist Nicholas Triolo on Monday, June 8, 2026 at 6:30pm.
The authors will read from their new books, Kludt’s I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little and Triolo’s The Way Around. They will discuss their work and how weaving writing with walking invites us into fields of radical affection, centering awe and possibility in our uncertain times. They will discuss how revision, both on the page and on the path, can distill what’s true in a life, and how devotion to unending pilgrimage of curiosity is perhaps the most renewable energy source.
Signed copies of I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little (Green Writers Press, 2026) and The Way Around (Milkweed Editions, 2025) will be available for purchase after the event.
Praise for The Way Around:
“The Way Around is the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world.”
—Robert Moor, author of On Trails: An Exploration
“Smart, funny, wise of mind and vast of heart, The Way Around offers a beautiful, intricate rebuke to our obsession with linearity and outcome. In place of the summit, it argues for the circumambulation; in place of the line, the circle; in place of the goal, the return. Over its course, the book buds its own subtle circles—kora, ourobouros, beaten bounds—and its patterns and rhythms begin to reshape themselves into rings and revolutions, until on the final pages both reader and writer are returned to the point of origin—though, of course, profoundly changed by the circumambulation that has brought them there.”
—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey
“You can’t read this book from left to right—instead you’ll swirl through, dervish-like. Trust Nicholas Triolo—his gorgeous, clear-eyed words and hard-earned footfalls—with every hair on your head. He’s done the good hard work here, stacking cairns along the trail’s curvature, seeking direction from monks and poets. He’s more than just following their lead, though. He slogs through mud, suffers blisters—but the whole route courses through atrium and ventricle. I’d follow this writer anywhere, for he’s gone to the place where we began, where we can begin again. The Way Around is the rarest and truest kind of adventure tale: the kind that can reclaim us from our lost, all-too-linear selves.”
—Amy Irvine, author of Desert Cabal
“To circumambulate three targets as diverse as Kailash, Mount Tam, and Montana’s hellacious Berkeley Pit called for a sense of humor as blithe as his endurance and courage are brutal, plus a sense of the surreal as unique as early Brautigan. The Triolo solo that resulted felt as though Nick somehow swallowed a choir. I consider The Way Around one of the finest first books I’ve read in my life.”
—David James Duncan, author of Sun House
Praise for I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little:
"I read I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little in two mesmerized sittings and never got over how, in the sorrows of Krissy’s poems, and in their joys, there is equal grandeur. She finds ways to make dread and loss so beautiful it infuses her fears with a fearlessness. Her attention to wildness is exquisite, and embraces opposites without hesitation….This is sheer mastery, and in a first book! I’ll be reading Krissy with elation for as long as I last."
- David James Duncan, author of Sun House, The Brothers K, & The River Why
"Krissy Kludt’s I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little evokes a special feeling… akin to a deep breath of petrichor; the scent of freshly damp earth after a long dry spell. Her poems rehydrate and enliven a sense of reverent curiosity…. and sprout hope in a time of significant transformation."
- Rowen White, Akwesasne Mohawk author and seedkeeper
"Krissy Kludt loiters on words that would have us stop and look down to see the smallest thing, even as sylvan giants with their boughs in the clouds loom lyrically overhead….This collection, long overdue but right on time in a world needing wild peace and love, proves true to the task of providing both. Take it with you when you walk. Read it aloud by the water and hear her voice."
- J. Drew Lanham, author of Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves, and The Home Place
The Forever Pilgrimage: A Conversation on Writing and Walking with Nicholas Triolo and Krissy Kludt
Poet Krissy Kludt is the founder and executive director of Writing the Wild. Her debut poetry collection, I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little, is forthcoming from Green Writers Press on March 5, 2026. Her work appears in anthologies The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025), Taking Liberties (Cutthroat 2025), and Stories from the Trail (Wayfarer Books 2024), and in other publications, including Terrain.org, The Wildness We Tend, and Humana Obscura. She lives in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.
Nicholas Triolo is an author, editor, and educator living in Missoula, Montana. Triolo has worked in publishing for over ten years—editor-in-chief, Camas; digital strategist, Orion; senior editor, Outside/Trail Runner; managing editor, Magic Canoe. He’s taught place-based writing for the University of Montana, Yale/Oxford Academia, Wild Rockies Field Institute, Writing the Wild, Freeflow Institute, and the Missoula Writing Collaborative. Triolo’s words, films, and photography have been featured in Orion, Emergence, Dark Mountain Project, Outside, Terrain.org, and others. His book, The Way Around, was published by Milkweed Editions in July 2025, and has been featured in People, Longreads, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Read more on his newsletter, "The Jasmine Dialogues."
PLAN YOUR VISIT
Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.
Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.