Behind the Scenes at the Land Conservancy: A Profile of Kyle Semmel

You may not recognize our Communications Manager, Kyle Semmel. He mostly works behind the scenes putting together our newsletters, press releases, events, and other communications materials. But he recently celebrated his 5th anniversary with the Land Conservancy, and we’re thrilled to have him on our team.

Kyle grew up between Rochester and Buffalo in a repurposed gambrel-roof barn on thirty acres of land, and he spent a lot of time wandering around the forest behind his house. During summer and fall, he loved sitting on logs watching sunlight and shadow dapple the trees’ leaves as they shivered in the breeze. He was an imaginative kid, and when he was alone in the woods with his thoughts, he would pretend time had slipped away and he was no longer in the present but two or three-hundred years in the past. Timelessness, he says, is an under-appreciated benefit of any forest.

His father taught him to value nature. “A man once approached my dad about buying our land to log it,” Kyle says. “He could've made a lot of money on the deal, but he said no. We weren’t rich by any means, and the cash surely could’ve helped our family finances. But dad’s insistence on keeping the forest intact made a lasting impression on me. This is one of the reasons I’m so excited to be at the Land Conservancy, doing what we do.”

It’s hardly surprising that Kyle gravitated toward history, literature, and languages in college. Eventually, he wound up translating more than a dozen novels from Danish or Norwegian. It was when translating these books that he developed the habit of getting up at 5:00 a.m. every morning to work on his writing/translations before going to his full-time job[s]—a habit he maintains to this day.

Writing as K.E. Semmel, Kyle has published widely in publications as various as the Washington Post, Lithub, HuffPost, and The Millions. In October, after thirty years of writing fiction, he will publish his first novel. It’s called The Book of Losman, and Edan Lepucki calls it “an assured, remarkable debut.” It has already sold audio rights and you can learn more about it here at his website.

Kyle may work largely behind the scenes at the Land Conservancy, and you may not always see him, but his work is imprinted in the very fabric of all that we do here.