Tag: Wyoming Writers

4,000 miles in ten days

Posted on | by Susan Tweit | 6 Comments on 4,000 miles in ten days
Sunset from my Eldorado house

I love a road trip across the open spaces of the West. The time spent in my truck watching these expansive landscapes pass by out the windows with Emmy Lou or Carrie or Ian or whomever on the stereo is curiously restful and energizing. “Windshield time,” a friend of mine calls it.

It’s time unplugged, because I’m usually solo and I don’t use my phone to surf the internet or text while driving–for reasons that should be obvious, but clearly aren’t to the hordes who text while at the wheel. I let my mind wander from the balsamroot and lupine blooming gold and purple on the hillsides to the hawks wheeling overhead to the trucks passing by–what is that huge lumpy thing under the enormous tarp on that oversized load, and where is it going? My imagination soars over the horizon; my memory conjures other times when I’ve traveled this road or worked nearby….

Red Canyon on Wyoming’s Wind River. Seriously inspiring windshield time!

Road trips are my dreaming time, my relaxing time, my solo time (unless I’m traveling with the Guy). But sometimes I overdo it, and I have to say that’s the case for this last one. Before I left Santa Fe last Wednesday afternoon, I took Rojita in for her 10,000 mile service. This morning I looked at her dusty odometer screen and realized with a start that I’ve driven almost 4,000 miles since then. In ten days.

No wonder I’m tired.

But what a trip it’s been! First, north to Salida, where Richard and I lived for the better part of two decades. That night, my dear friend Sheila Veazey opened her She-la-Vie hair and skin studio to give me the great haircut that only Sheila can. We spent two hours catching up and drinking Cava (Spanish sparkling wine), which may count as the best spa experience I have ever had. The haircut is insanely great too.

Sagebrush bluebells (Mertensia oblongifolia) in bloom at Ring Lake Ranch

From there I headed north to Ring Lake Ranch, where the Guy works in summer with the horse herd. The spring wildflowers were in full show, and the peaks were still splattered with snow, which was seriously refreshing after months of brown and dry in northern New Mexico. But I had miles to go, so after a night there I pushed on. (And was in such a hurry that I left my laptop on the table in his cabin. Big oops.)

First to Cody, in far northwest Wyoming, where I had work. And then, on a hot Friday afternoon, I aimed Rojita north and way west on the long trek to my brother and sister-in-law’s land above the Columbia River Gorge in eastern Washington, a patch of meadows fingered with oak and ponderosa pine forest with views of the snowy cone of Mt. Adams.

Mt. Adams from the meadow where we buried our dead.

The Tweit clan–four generations of us–gathered there to bless their new house, and to bury our beloved dead in one of those meadows under a gnarled old pair of Oregon oak trees, with the last of the golden balsamroot blooming around them, along with pale frasera, purple lupine, and other wildflowers. As we placed the porcelain jar with Richard’s ashes in one hole, and co-mingled our parents’ ashes in another hole, black-headed grosbeaks sang their robin-like songs as swallows dipped and swooped overhead.

Mimosas are a morning tradition for we women at a Tweit-clan gathering.

The weekend was rich, with lots of time to catch up and be outside on the land, and only one major meltdown, which I figure is pretty good with all of us together. The less than pretty parts of our messy family relationships are bound to come up when we gather, and that’s healthy, I think. It’s how we respond–with as much love as we can muster–that makes me proud of my clan, even when we screw up.

From Klickitat County, Washington, Rojita and I headed back to Cody, only this time via the longer southern route across Oregon and Idaho, passing through Jackson Hole and down the Wind River to Ring Lake Ranch to retrieve my laptop.

Coming over Teton Pass from Idaho into Wyoming, the shades of green were almost intoxicating.

With the high desert desperately dry this year, I thirst for water and green, and I savored both in the mountains of western Wyoming, and walking the trail along the river with friends in Cody.

From Cody, I headed south to Lander, Wyoming, for a weekend of teaching workshops at Wyoming Writers annual conference. And then, after that immersion in words and creative energy, Rojita and I made one more long push to return to Santa Fe.

What’s next for me?

On Thursday, June 10th, at 6 pm RMT I’m talking with Sharman Russell, author of Within Our Grasp, for the second Zoom-based conversation in my monthly series. We’ll be looking at how childhood malnutrition affects our economies, cultures, and the future of the planet—and also the very reasonable solutions for this global problem, as well as what it all has to do with living with love. The event is sponsored and hosted by Women’s International Study Center.

Join Sharman and me for a Zoom-based conversation on our new books Thursday, June 10th at 6 pm RMT.

And on Friday, I hit the road again, headed back to Wyoming for my summer work. More on that in another blog post!

Writing for Biodiversity

Posted on | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment on Writing for Biodiversity


I spent the weekend in Gillette, Wyoming, a nearly five-hour drive east of Cody, over the Bighorn Mountains and out on the spring-green northern plains (plains photo above).


Gillette is the heart of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin with its gargantuan coal strip-mines. Coal didn’t call me to northeastern Wyoming; writing did. Gillette happened to be the site of this year’s Wyoming Writers conference.


I hadn’t intended to go this year–I’m too newly returned home and I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed with all I have to do in writing, book reviewing, and house/yard renovation. Not to mention that I’m leaving next Friday for ten days in Yellowstone and my annual “vacation” as a weed eradication volunteer. 



But my friend Patricia Frolander, former poet laureate of Wyoming, a powerful writing voice, a rancher and mom who is newly widowed, asked if I was coming and offered to share her hotel room. Which seemed like an opportunity I’d regret missing. 


So Friday mid-morning I headed east, stopping near the McCullough Peaks just outside town to ogle deep blue Nuttall’s delphiniums and starry white daisies blooming in the sagebrush country.



The snowy ramparts of Carter Mountain on the distant skyline; cobalt-blue clumps of Delphinium nuttallianum bloom in the foreground. 


An hour and some later, I wound my way up Tensleep Canyon into the Bighorn Mountains, passed to the south of Cloud Peak Wilderness Area with its rounded peaks looking like snowy piles of clouds. Coming down the east side of the range, I had to stop again to admire the sunshine-gold swaths of arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) coloring the mountainsides, along with purple spires of silky lupine.  



By the time I got to Gillette, I just had time to unload my stuff in the hotel room, and then head to the conference center to register.


After which the weekend was a whirlwind immersion in writing talks and workshops, informal talks with other writers, and thinking and breathing and even sleeping all things writing. (I even dreamed in typewriter letters last night!)


I’m still processing all I experienced and learned, but two things stand out: First, what a warm and supportive community Wyoming Writers is. Everyone I met was welcoming, and the workshop time was insightful and substantive, without degenerating into the kind of unhealthy competitiveness that marks some conferences. 


Second, keynote speaker Nina McConighley, who grew up in Casper and is East Indian and Irish, talked about “growing up brown” and “the wrong kind of Indian” in Wyoming. In her workshops and her speech, she challenged us to go beyond the myths and stereotypes and look at The West and Wyoming through new eyes.


“Tell the unusual stories,” she said. (If you haven’t read her PEN-award-winning short story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, do. It’s funny, heart-wrenching, and deeply perceptive.)


I thought about McConighley’s words all the way home, driving west across the Northern Plains toward the shining peaks of the Bighorns, winding up and down over the range itself, and then zipping across the undulating surface of the Bighorn Basin toward the rugged ridges of the Absarokas, the mountains that call me home. 


As writers, we have the ability to touch people’s hearts and open their minds, to help enlarge their perspective on the world. In this time of polarized and angry political discourse and yesterday, yet another attack where ordinary people were killed simply because they represent a group, culture, or nation the bombers hate, writing the unusual stories can help us learn to value diversity rather than fear it.



Diversity like this meadow in the Bighorn Mountains, a mosaic pattered by dozens of species of wildflowers (including that gorgeous magenta Dodecatheon or shooting star), grasses, sedges, and shrubs, and this afternoon at least, abuzz with native bees and flies of varying sizes and echoing with the songs of half a dozen kinds of birds.


If we write in a way that reveals the unusual, the stories of lives who do not conform to the norm, we can help “normalize” differences and calm our readers’ fears. If our work gives voice to the sometimes-hidden or overlooked diversity of our communities and cultures, we can help our readers understand or at least have sympathy for those whose lives and beliefs, whose skin color and choices are radically different from our own.


Writing the unusual, we can help break down barriers of hate and fear. 


As a scientist, a plant-nerd, and an older woman, the perspective I bring to this conversation is a voice speaking on behalf of biodiversity. (One thing nature teaches us is that diversity is a healthy attribute for communities and ecosystems.)



The “unusual stories” I tell are those of our fellow species with whom we share the earth, those remarkable more-than-human lives who together weave this planet into numinous and shimmering life. Like the mariposa lily (Calochortus gunnisoni) in the photo above, offering its cup with nectar to pollinating insects. 


I’ve been searching for my mission statement, a succinct way to describe my parallel passions in writing and ecological restoration. Perhaps it is simply this:


I work for biodiversity. To restore earth and humanity, word by word, plant by plant. 


I write for the mariposa lilies blooming in ephemeral profusion before the moisture that fueled their unusually abundant spring emergence vanishes and the clay soil dries hard as brick. For the bumblebees and metallic green sweat bees who were pollinating those saucer-shaped blossoms today, the kingbird sitting on a nearby fence waiting to catch some of those pollinators to feed its growing nestlings, and the prairie dogs that savor the sun-fed sugars the mariposa lilies store in their underground bulbs. For the black-footed ferrets we saved from extinction to feed on the prairie dogs, and the big sagebrush, whose sweet turpentine scent perfumed my drive home. For the whole interrelated stew of existence, in all its glorious unusualness. 


I work for biodiversity, to celebrate all life. Not just the lives like mine, not just the lives I prefer. All life. That our planet may thrive, and we along with it.