Every Tuesday morning since 2006 on WYSO, “Poor Will’s Almanack” has been the exhale we didn’t know we needed.
Written and recorded by Bill Felker, “Almanack” is a three-minute reflection on the transformational power of slowing down to notice the natural world and our place in it. Unfortunately, the series will come to a close at the end of the month because Felker is losing his eyesight to an aggressive form of macular degeneration. Writing and reading what he has written have become too difficult, he says.
Felker started composing what he calls his “daybooks,” modeled on Henry David Thoreau’s daily journals, in the early 1980s, partly as a way to distract himself as he quit smoking. He would walk in the woods and take obsessively detailed notes on what he observed and how it affected him: “I started to see the utility of the observations and how you can build a whole structure of time and emotion around the natural calendar.”
He eventually turned his notes into a column for the Yellow Springs News, which first published “Almanack” in 1984, and later in 2006 he began recording it for WYSO.
“Working with WYSO has been wonderful,” Felker says. “I feel really fortunate to have had that opportunity to talk to people on the air like that.”
WYSO General Manager Luke Dennis says “Almanack” has been such a fixture on the air that it will be bittersweet not to hear it every week.
“Felker and his commentary embody so much of what WYSO is about: curiosity, contemplation, respect for the world around us," Dennis says. "We are really going to miss what he brought to our programming.”
Navigating the world with fading vision is “very disorienting,” says the 85-year-old Felker. Not even being able to write to-do lists any more makes daily life challenging — and while he may use voice-to-text to keep writing his column (published in newspapers around the country), he says he’s just not sure how well that will work.
But as Felker talks about this new phase of his journey, there’s still a trademark lightness in his voice — a gratitude for his experience as an author and a sense of openness to whatever is next.
“Thanks for calling,” he says as the interview about the end of the series wraps up. “And thanks for listening.”