Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet. … When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true.
My books have won national and regional awards, and given me the more personal reward of letters and emails from fans who say that my words touched their hearts, changed the way they see the world, inspired them to travel, garden, fall in love with a place, or appreciate the world in new ways.
Each of these books is a love letter to the earth and its living web of lives, humans included. May they touch your life and open your eyes and heart!
Anthologies
Browse anthologies and other books that contain my work, including collections on ecology, wilderness, women on the road, spiritual concerns, and more. I’ve also contributed to books on birds and wildflowers, including an award-winning photo coffee table book on California wildflowers and climate change, and two other photo coffee table books on American landscapes and National Parks, both of which were Book-of-the-Month Club selections.
Audio Books
I fell in love with audio recordings when I had the opportunity to write and record a weekly radio commentary for KRWG-FM, public radio in southern New Mexico and west Texas for nearly seven years. Working with two great producers–thank you, Tom Huizenga and David Brower!–I learned how to use my voice and my words to conjure images and stories out of the air, as it were.
My dream of recording the audio for one of my own books came true when I had the opportunity to narrate the audiobook version of my memoir, Walking Nature Home. Narrating an audiobook takes a lot longer than you’d think–I spent weeks recording at a microphone in my home office and then playing each section, listening for errors, re-recording and editing, using a custom recording desk my late husband, Richard built for me. Recording my own work was an intense and rich experience, yielding a new and deeper experience of a story I thought I already knew well.
After recording the audiobook version of Walking Nature Home, I worked on a project of my own, a compilation of some of my favorite of my radio commentaries in a collection called “WildLives” after my long-running show. Click on the cover images below to learn more about each project and listen to samples. Enjoy!
Why I Write
Writing is my way of loving life, of expressing my terraphilia. It’s that simple. My twelve books—thirteen when Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying comes out in April of 2021—and my thirty-plus years of weekly newspaper columns and radio commentaries, articles and essays for magazines and newspapers, anthologies I’ve contributed to, interpretive signs and displays, road guides, and my presentations are suffused with the joy I feel at being alive and part of the astonishingly rich living community we call Earth. My work reflects my sense of wonder at how life–the capital ‘L’ stuff–goes about its business in a myriad of diverse ways, all aimed at making a place for each individual life and its genes on this planet.
Writing is also my way of telling the stories I see in the landscapes around me, of giving voice to the community of the land and to our place in it. It’s my vocation as well as my passion, my practice of witnessing to my experience and the experience of all of those lives whose voices we don’t easily hear.
Perhaps home is wherever we give as much as we get, the way flocks of sandhill cranes fertilize the ground where they feed and roost, any place where our voices linger in story and song and the memories of our sojourn stir hearts long after we are gone, regardless of whether we were born there or how long we stay.
Susan J. Tweit, The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes
