Author Event: Emily Meg Weinstein (Turn to Stone) & Nick Triolo (The Way Forward)

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Emily Meg Weinstein on Wednesday, November 5, 2025 at 7:00 pm. Weinstein will read from her debut memoir Turn to Stone (Simon & Schuster, September 2025) and be in conversation with Missoula-based writer Nick Triolo, author of The Way Forward (Milkweed Editions, July 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Turn to Stone:
Down on the ground, it was hard to connect, hard to attach, hard to untangle, hard to let go. But up here, I understood. Up here, I could make it good.

Broken by an abusive relationship, Emily Meg Weinstein impulsively tries rock climbing on a California road trip, following strangers into the vertical world. Soon, she is consumed by her addiction to the freedom she feels when she’s up on the wall. Holding on to the rocks, she is free from societal constraints and expectations, free from her own sorrows and longings.

Raw and dark, but also funny, Weinstein describes the steep learning curve of becoming a climber, spending weeks at a time sleeping in the back of her Subaru, and a long, dark night stuck on top of a mountain. As she ascends, Weinstein faces her demons, finding power and grace in risk and adventure. Like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, but in the vertical, or William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, if lived by a Jewish woman from Long Island, Turn to Stone tells the story of a journey into nature that becomes a crucible of self-discovery.

Against a tapestry of van-dwellers, anarchists, and Jedi-like Stonemasters, Weinstein explores a world where each leap of faith is an existential lesson. From living on the edge, stepping into the unknown, and falling through thin air, Emily learns to forgive her own failures, heal her deepest wounds, and find courage in the face of fear. Throwing herself at walls of stone, she learns what it means to be human. Fitting her body into the rocks’ broken places, she makes herself whole.

About The Way Forward:
Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. “Do the reps,” he internalized. “Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.” Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.

While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object—a kind of “ritualized remembering” birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet’s Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home—for the flourishing of all.

Author Biographies:
Emily Meg Weinstein was born in New York and raised in Queens and Long Island. She lives on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay, roams in her second home, the Free Ford Freestar, and roots for the New York Mets.

Nicholas Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and long-distance trail runner. His writing and images have been featured in Orion, Outside, Terrain.org, and Trail Runner. He has directed two documentary films, “The Crossing” and “Shaped by Fire,” and collaborated with Salomon on a film about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Triolo’s films have been Official Selections for several international film festivals and featured on influential platforms such as Patagonia’s Dirtbag Diaries, Upworthy, and Outside magazine. Triolo is based in Missoula, Montana, and you can read more about him at nicholastriolo.net.