My name is Stefano Buckley, & I am a writer & farmer.
I live on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. My family is of Italian, Ukrainian, Irish, and French heritage. This has resulted in an interest in the various histories and cultures that intersect in my life, and those of the world more broadly. I have travelled throughout Europe and the Pacific Northwest, distilling what I have experienced through writing and photography.
I want to connect people to place. I believe that by honing into landscape, food traditions, stories, history, and language, we can appreciate our own humanness, and better connect to the non-human world we dwell in. These are the things I enjoy writing about.
I write both creative non-fiction narratives and academic articles that explore the character of a particular place, a portfolio of which you may find on this site. My written work has also been published in Folklife magazine, The Hopper, Release Peace magazine, and Duke University’s Historia Nova. My photography can be found on Instagram (@stefanobuckley), and on this site.
Besides writing and photography, food has always been central to my life. Food is connection to the land, connection to others, and connection to ourselves. I was raised in a household where we always dined together, and where eating was recognised as far more than just a way to be rid of hunger. Whenever I have lacked a common language with people, our communication has come through experiencing the landscape and sharing its foods.
This relationship to food has led to my path as a farmer. Vibrant pea-pods, x-rayed by the setting sun; potatoes dug from the Earth in autumn with numb muddy hands. Being a farmer is elemental, and it is the physical to the mental (in both senses) of the written word. If my writing explores the relationships we build with the land, it is in farming that I embody my own expression of this relationship. Together, they are the two halves that make up my work.
—Stefano
