The Butler and Bagman Chronicles is a blog by Mark Cowell about his personal interests. But he is also the son of Al Seely, an Everglades hermit mentioned in our 2004 article on the Florida Everglades hermits. In a set of entries with keyword “hermit”, Cowell notes that Al Seely was an alcoholic, and that his hermiting adventure was motivated by a diagnosis of fatal liver cirrhosis; he ventured to the Everglades to either survive or die — and he survived. A blog entry also mentions E. F. Atkinson, another hermit profiled in the 2004 article.
New Hampshire hermit
Perley: the True Story of a New Hampshire Hermit is a new book written by Shiela Swett Thompson, granddaughter of Perley Swett, a hermit of Cheshire County. The book is published by the county’s historical society.
Philadelphia ecohermit
A Philadelphia Weekly item on Ron Marco, a theology graduate student who lives the life of an “ecohermit,” inspired in part by the desert hermits of ancient Egypt and contemporary canonical hermit Richard Withers, who lives in a Philadelphia row house. Marco charts the progress of his Urban Hermitage Project in a blog at http://natureformandspirit.blogspot.com
Martha Ainsworth: Episcopal solitary
Article by Paul O’Donnell in New York Magazine titled “Hermit of the Heart,” with subtitle: “With no convent but the city itself, one woman finds a prayerful solitude as a contemplative order of one.” About Martha Ainsworth’s attempt to define a religious vocation as a solitary approved canonically by the local Episcopal bishop. Interesting example of being a hermit in the crowd.
URL: http://nymag.com/guides/mindbody/2008/42818/
Accommodations
This brief Sept. 2007 New York Times article entitled “My Life as a Hermit” by Edward Lewine was placed in the newspaper’s real estate section because of its focus on hermits trying to find suitably inexpensive places to live.
URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/realestate/keymagazine/
909HSHERMIT-t.html?ref=keymagazine