Welcome. Exploring Close To Home

Welcome. It is a strange time to start a blog or do anything really. It feels as though time has stopped. I have been sheltering in place since mid-March, and it has been a time for reflection. My writer self has been searching for “the extraordinary in the ordinary”, as novelist Cynthia Ozick would say, because suddenly “ordinary” has become something new.

I am obsessed with stories about places and ecology, and right now I am finding comfort, more than ever, in nature. I am forty-seven years old (when did that happen?) and have spent a lifetime exploring the natural world. I studied biology as an undergrad, and then went on to study education, ecology, and science writing.

After moving to Texas nearly twenty years ago, I received my Texas Master Naturalist certification. Although I live and write from my home in the Texas Hill Country, I am originally from Northern Virginia. I have also lived in New England, and I return often to a very special place on the Maine Coast.

Through my stories, I explore the ways in which people connect with nature. Sometimes I write about places that are small and close to home (a rotting log or the creatures beneath a rock); sometimes I write about faraway places (a cave in Kauai or a bay in Maine). Lately, much of my writing has come from my backyard, a place where the wild things roam—caterpillars, lizards, deer, and roadrunners, just to name a few.

My family (my husband and three sons) and I have spent the last seven years trying to restore a little one-acre patch of overgrazed ranch land and turn it into a native prairie. While I’m not sure it has been a success (Johnson grass and fire ants - argh!), it has kept us busy and provided a place to view ecology in action at all times, a place to feel connected to the larger world.

I also love to read. Annie Dillard wrote: “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” Yes, that’s me. Books have had such an impact on my experience in the world that I have come to think of the writers as friends and mentors. Here are some of my favorite nature writers whose words, I imagine, will make frequent appearances here on this blog:

1. Rachel Carson
2. Aldo Leopold
3. Annie Dillard
   
4. Edward Abbey
5. Patianne Rogers
6. Brian Doyle
7. Robin Wall Kimmerer
8. Mary Oliver
9. Kathleen Jamie
10. Richard Louv
11. David Sobel
12. E.O. Wilson
13. Barry Lopez
14. Terry Tempest Williams
15. Robert Macfarlane
    

Connect With Nature Through Story:
I hope this blog will encourage you to connect with nature - to explore the natural world through story, whether you write, read, take pictures, or simply wander. Stories await right outside your door or window, and if you are lucky, in a few faraway places, too.  And, finally, I hope that you will be inspired to go out and share your stories with the world.