Marc Beaudin is a poet, theater artist, naturalist, book-seller, and self-described “Ulysses-junkie, jazz-head, social anarchist, and vagabondaoist,” who currently resides in Livingston. He is the author of two books of poetry, Life List: Poems released in 2020, and the collection The Moon Cracks Open as well as several poetry chapbooks and plays, the novel A Handful of Dust and the hiking memoir, Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals.
Life List, released in 2020 by Riverfeet Press, has been described as "exquisite and full of life like the birds themselves," by Terry Tempest Williams (the American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist). The book is a true Livingston collaboration: written by a Livingston poet, published by Livingston’s Riverfeet Press, and featuring artwork and a cover design by Livingston artists Storrs Bishop and Megan Eubank. Life List was a 2020 Montana Book Award Honor Book Winner.
The book was completed in a forest cabin during an artist-in-residence program sponsored by the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation. The text is a beautiful combo of poems by Beaudin and monotypes by Storrs Bishop that mingles of ornithology, an ode to our feathered friends with acute observations of political and socioeconomic issues. The book is broken apart by birds of the Eastern and Western United States, as well as birds of Europe, Mexico and Central America, and ends with a poem dedicated to the extinct passenger pigeon.
Beaudin is one of the proprietors of Elk River Books on Main Street in downtown Livingston.
