I was born in Johnson City, Tennessee in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains of the Appalachians. It was a time when WWII, the greatest conflagration of world war, was coming to an end. My father, who’d been a B-29 pilot, joined the newly formed Air Force after the war. I began a sixteen-year journey in a military family. My parents, sisters and I traveled as a roving clan, moving coast to coast and Hawai’i. This formative experience inspired my eventual development into a storyteller and novelist.
I married a friend from the same region after we finished our college degrees at East Tennessee State Univerity where my father and grandmother received their degrees. We moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York when our son Tommy was 2 years old and Heather, 9 months old. Over the next 15 years we enjoyed raising our children in a lovely old settlement of Dutch origin on the Hudson River and being a part of a diverse community of 6.000 souls.
In college I studied American literature with a minor in science – a duality that continues to influence what I write about most. I taught natural science in public school, community college, and nature centers while living in Arizona. The Sonoran Desert profoundly affected my psyche and writing. Where else do animals sleep during the daytime and prowl the nights, or where monsoon rains sprout tropical flowers in brilliant colors from cacti which appear to be dead? The desert abides by its own rhythm. That’s why I felt at home there.
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 Southwest.
In 2006 the Frank Waters Foundation awarded me a writer’s residency near Taos in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Frank Waters is a Southwestern writer whose fiction inspired my writing during an 8-week residency. A speculative fiction novel about climate change in Arizona evolved into an imaginative adventure. It was accepted for publication by Fireship Press. Threshold was inspired by my love for the people of Tucson.
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 Coast 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.
During the Pandemic, I wrote The Last Farm on Lovers’ Lane, a novel about a young woman who inherits her family’s farm and tries to regenerate and reforest it amidst family strife, a deadly secret and climate change. It is based in Kentucky where I lived and fell in love with the people, the foodshed and farming familes, and the beauty of the land – much like that of my birthplace in East Tennessee. Karst ecology with caverns and myriad streams and lakes, blue holes and underground rivers, keep the explorer ever fascinated.
Writing is a way of being in the world, telling stories from experiences on life’s path, drawing from the treasure of people who inspired me, made me laugh and who remain dear companions on this blessed walk on planet Earth.
Susan Feathers 