Reading Robert Finch Brewster Library Event Honors Late Nature Writer

BREWSTER – This Saturday, fans of the late author and conservationist Robert Finch are invited to share with an audience of like-minded fans their favorite passages from Finch’s writings at the Brewster Ladies’ Library.

The event, “Honoring Robert Finch: Readings from His Works,” is the brainchild of Ben McKelway of Brewster, a longtime fan of Finch’s “exquisite writing” who attended a similar standing-room-only event in Wellfleet last December.

 At the Wellfleet event, “I would have liked to read a passage myself, so I decided to organize one here in which the audience could participate,” McKelway said in an email interview last weekend.

Finch lived in Brewster, where he was active in conservation circles until 1994, when he moved to Wellfleet.

Beginning in 2005, Finch’s voice was a familiar one on WCAI, as he read his weekly essays in the series “A Cape Cod Notebook.” Many, but not all, of Finch’s essays revolved around nature. When Tony Bennett died in 2023 Finch recalled seeing Bennett perform at the Cape Cod Melody Tent. Finch also wrote and edited over a dozen highly acclaimed books. Along the way he was twice honored with the Edward R. Murrow Award for Radio Writing and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Finch died at the age of 81 from complications of Parkinson’s disease in September 2024.

While Finch’s name is familiar through his books and radio work, in Brewster he is also known for his role in a major accomplishment: saving from development the 800 wild acres now known as the Punkhorn Parklands.

Brewster is where Finch’s mentor, the nature writer John Hay (whose career a generation earlier was similar to Finch’s), co-founded the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in 1954. By the 1980s the rural town was fast being developed. In 1984 Finch was appointed co-chair of the new Brewster Land Acquisition Committee, and in that role led the way in the effort to preserve the area of ponds, defunct bogs and woodlands in the center of Brewster.

 “There were many small parcels with cloudy titles, but there were also subdivisions planned, and water pipes already laid along the old dirt roads,” McKelway recalls. “Bob assembled a team of real estate appraisers, attorneys, deed researchers and other volunteers. He negotiated with landowners, drew maps in the days before computers, worked with town government leaders, and made a thoroughly researched presentation to town meeting.”

 Finch’s efforts paid off. In 1987, Brewster voters approved the acquisition of the Punkhorn Parklands. Finch himself revisited the details of the great preservation triumph in March 2022 in his delightful on-air essay called “Imagining the Punkhorn.”

Brewster is also where McKelway met Finch in the summer of 1981 after he and his family moved to the town.

“We had no jobs lined up, so I went to the state unemployment office in Orleans in hopes of finding some leads,” McKelway says. “When I told the counselor I was interested in the environment, he right away said, ‘You have to meet Bob Finch — call the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History.’”

 Finch, who was then the museum’s publications director, took on McKelway as a volunteer copy editor for the museum’s quarterly magazine, “The Cape Naturalist.”

Years later, “I must have remarked how clearly his writing flowed, and I remember him acknowledging that as the key — working and reworking a sentence to make it sound as if it just rolled easily off your tongue.”

Finch, born in Newark, N.J. in 1943, first visited Cape Cod in 1962 when he was a freshman at Harvard. He moved to the Cape in 1972.

 In his introduction to “A Place Apart: A Cape Cod Reader,” Finch, who dedicates the book to John and Kristi Hay, poses the question: “Why have so many off-Cape writers who come to the Cape written about the Cape?”

Finch’s answer gives us a lot to chew on. He writes, in part, that “this peninsula, thrust 30 miles out into the sea, is one of the world’s great edges.” And “this edge, where land meets sea, has proved to be a fruitful site for illuminating the human condition.” For roughly half a century, living at this “edge” provided plenty of fodder for Finch.

 Fourteen people, including McKelway, are scheduled to speak at the Brewster event. Among them are Finch’s first wife Beth Finch, a conservationist who serves on the Brewster Conservation Trust board; naturalist and author Peter Trull; and Chatham Conservation Agent Paul Wightman.

 When asked to ponder Finch’s legacy, McKelway says, “In Brewster, I hope folks will remember him for his success at protecting wild areas in perpetuity, as well as for his writing.” He adds that Finch’s writing, among those authors who write about Cape Cod, would be “at the very top.”

 “I think he was extraordinary.”

 “Honoring Robert Finch” will be held at the Brewster Ladies Library on Saturday, June 28 from 2 to 4 p.m. Participants are invited to read their favorite passages for a maximum of five minutes.

 For more information, or to register, visit brewsterladieslibrary.org or call 508-896-3913.