HRMM Announces A Field of My Own: A Memoir of Place Lecture with Cynthia McVay

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Contact: Emma Cariello / Museum Educator / [email protected]

Program Title: A Field of My Own: A Memoir of Place with Cynthia McVay
Date & Time: Monday, November 10, 2025 - 7pm
Location: Hudson River Maritime Museum - 50 Rondout Landing, Kingston, NY
Pricing: $10/non member - $5/ HRMM members

Presentation Topic: ​Pull on your boots and take a walk with Cynthia McVay and her dogs in a riveting landscape rife with adventure and discovery. In A Field of My Own: A Memoir of Place, lifelong creative and environmentalist McVay chronicles her intimate, two-decade relationship with a flagging orchard in the Hudson Valley. As a single working mother, she was looking for a weekend escape from New York City, a piece of green, a place to call her own. One blustery winter day, she falls in love with a meadow and her life is forever altered. She renovates the modest cottage, builds a pondish-pool, creates pollinating, native gardens from orphans and strays, learns to forage and runs the tractor. A decade in, as architect and general contractor, she moves an enormous 180-year-old hand-hewn Amish barn to the property to make her sustainable home.This engaging memoir of place is generous and honest, packed with useful know-how and humor. This is an ode to the Hudson Valley and something of a coming-of-middle-age story. Books will be available for purchase at the event. 

Bio of Speaker: After 25 years as a strategy and management consultant, Cynthia McVay returned to writing and art full-time. Her award-winning essays, stories and poems have appeared in literary journals. She served as Latin American Program Officer for the World Wildlife Fund and inaugural Director of Innovation for the Peace Corps. She holds a BA from Harvard in biology and studio arts, and an MA in international studies from the University of Pennsylvania and MBA from Wharton, as a Fellow of The Lauder Institute. Cynthia serves on numerous boards including the Rauch Foundation, Center for Large Landscape Conservation, Harvard Club of the Hudson Valley and John Burroughs Association. She splits her time between the Hudson Valley and St. Croix, USVI. She is a member of the Rondout Rowing Club and an obsessed rower; in the summer, you will likely see her on the docks in the morning.

The Follow the River lecture series is sponsored by Rondout Savings Bank.

​Find more information and registration details at hrmm.org or here.