When did A Walk in the Woods come into Christiane Maertens's life?

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Books That Changed My Life: Christiane Maertens & A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson Pt. 1

18 Feb 2025 · 0 min

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A short interview from the 'Books That Changed My Life' series in which host Chris Collins speaks with Christiane Maertens about the personal impact of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. In this excerpt Christiane recalls encountering the book around 2009–2010 and the conversation is framed as a reflective, personal discussion about how the book influenced her life and career.

Questions this video answers

Around 2009–2010.

The book that we're here to talk about is A Walk in the woods by Bill Bryson. How long ago did Walk in the woods come into your life?
It was like 2009, I think 2010.
And so what's your life look like at that point?
So my dad, because he fell in love with it, I spent most of my childhood living between El Salvador, Mexico and California. Fast forward to my adulthood. I started a career in sustainability and social impact. So I was building a lot of corporate partnerships and a lot of corporations, like they don't have huge resour to invest in a whole corporate responsibility team or things like that. So I thought to myself, huh, why don't I start an agency where we can basically be like a mini corporate responsibility team for these major corporations, major NGOs. And it took off. It took off, it took off. And just a quick pause before, right before I was getting ready to launch my company, my dad died unexpectedly.