About Bucolia

What's it like when your most audacious dream turns into a nightmare, which becomes your dream come true?

I am a writer, a therapist-in-training, and a person who often ends up doing things the hard way.

In 2024, I bought a 4.5-acre homestead on Orcas Island, Washington — a property that had been in the same family since the 1880s, until I bought it in foreclosure. I am the first person outside the family to own it.

What I'm doing, for now, is figuring out how to farm and rehabilitate the land, learning what it's like to live without running water or a working septic system, and living more honestly than I have at any other time in my life. I've launched two businesses. I spent a dozen years as Director of Creative Resourcing at Wieden+Kennedy. I am currently completing a master's degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. I am 53 years old and have never once taken the obvious path.

Bucolia is where I write about all of it — the land, the work, the weather, the community, the history I've stepped into and am still learning the shape of. It is, I think, a book that doesn't know it's a book yet.

Robin Rosenberg, Olga, WA

bucoliafarm@gmail.com