Born in Johnson City, Tennessee, I began a sixteen-year journey in a military family. My parents, sisters and I traveled as a roving clan, moving to U.S. Air Force bases coast to coast and Hawaii. This formative experience has served as an inspiration for my calling as a storyteller and novelist.
In college I studied English and American literature with a minor in science – a duality that influences what I write about most: nature and people. Over three decades, I taught science and environmental science in public schools, community colleges, and at informal science education institutions (museums and zoos, and nature centers).
Later I started a sole proprietorship, Write for Change. This began a time of intense writing to support nonprofits with writing services while supporting my writing life. From 2004 to 2009, I was invited to write a column for Tucson Green Magazine which featured essays about living in the American Southwest. Later I self-published Paean to the Earth (2008), a collection of essays, poetry, and short stories inspired by my experiences in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.
In 2006 the Frank Waters Foundation provided a Writer’s Residency at their artist’s cabin near Taos in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. During this eight-week residency, a speculative novel about climate change evolved into an imaginative adventure. Over the next decade I wrote several more drafts until it was accepted for publication by a small press in Tucson, Arizona: Fireship Press. Threshold was inspired by my love for the people of Tucson — a multicultural city with ancient roots of the Tohono O’odham.
I have continued to develop essays about humans and nature. In 2011, my essay, “A Way Forward in an Uncertain Future” was published in an anthology, edited by Martin Keogh: Hope Beneath Our Feet – Restoring Our Place in the Natural World (North Atlantic Press).
Other essays have been published in the 2021 Emerald Coat Review, Songs of Ourselves: America’s Interior Landscape (Blue Heron Book Works, 2015), Panoplyzine, SEJ Journal (Journal of the Society of Environmental Journalists), Pensacola Magazine, and in academic publications.
This blog is where I share new works with followers and review books by outstanding writers. WalkEarth.org also publishes links and information about climate change for communities to build resilience and transition to a sustaining way of life in which human communities are just one cog in the wheel of life on Mother Earth. It will be a return to life for Western culture.
Susan Feathers 