“What is the most important thing about writing?” That’s the question botanist and writer Susan J. Tweit asked Barry Lopez. His answer helped inform her newest book, Earthbound: A Year of Mindful Connection in Nature. We talk with Susan about how she weaves photography, science, haiku and spiritual practice through each chapter, and how these different genres help us connect more wholly with the natural world. We also talk about making up language for our own passions to better understand them, the reciprocal relationship between reader and writer, the effects of negative self-talk, and how simple conversations with other creatives fuel and ignite our own creative endeavors.
A plant ecologist by training, Susan J. Tweit traded fieldwork for writing when she realized she loved telling the stories in the data. Her fourteen books don’t pigeonhole well at all, ranging from memoirs (Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying and Walking Nature Home: A Life’s Journey) to nature (Seasons on the Pacific Coast and Seasons in the Desert, Chronicle Books) and travel (Colorado Scenic Byways). They are united by the idea of terraphilia and “re-storying” the human-nature bond. Her writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers from Audubon and Popular Mechanics to the Los Angeles Times and High Country News, and in Best American Nature Writing along with two dozen other anthologies. She lives in an orchard-growing valley on Colorado’s rural West Slope, where big sagebrush perfumes the air and high mesas define the horizon. Her newest book is Earthbound: A Year of Mindful Connection in Nature.
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