Author will speak as part of the speaker series in Avon Tuesday
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AVON, Colorado – Naturalist Susan J. Tweit will speak about connecting with nature and landscapes we love as she invites us to consider “Returning the Practice of Nature to Our Everyday Lives” in the first installment of the High Country Speaker Series. The event takes place at the Avon Public Library on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. Tweit will also share observations and stories from her experience as a field ecologist.
An award-winning author, Tweit studied grizzly bear habitat, wildfire patterns and sagebrush communities when she realized that she loved telling the stories behind the data more than collecting them. Her 12 books explore what Aldo Leopold called “the community of the land” and humans’ place in it and include “The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes” and a memoir, “Walking Nature Home, A Life’s Journey.”
“It seems to me that many of us feel lost, as if we’ve cut ourselves off from something we deeply need. I think that what we’re missing is an everyday connection with nature,” Tweit said. “We may have forgotten nature, but the community of the land has not forgotten us. Every day, the other species around us go about their lives in our company. It’s often no harder to get to know them than it is our human neighbors, and it’s just as enlightening. Better still, it weaves us into the fabric of nature, and brings us home.”
Tweit’s essays and articles appear in magazines and newspapers as varied as Audubon and Popular Mechanics, the Los Angeles Times and High Country News, as well as in Fine Gardening and on the Martha Stewart Living Radio Network. She teaches writing and awareness workshops at colleges, universities, and writing festivals across the country. Among the multiple awards and honors she has received for her work are a Colorado Book Award, a Colorado Author’s League “Top Hand” Award, and an EDDIE Award (one of the top awards in the magazine industry).
Tweit and her husband, sculptor Richard Cabe, partner to restore and “re-story” blighted urban and industrial landscapes, returning nature and heritage plants, and re-weaving the community of the land in artful ways that reconnect people with nature and history in the places they work and live. The couple was recently awarded a two-year working residency to envision a large interpretive garden at The Nature Conservancy’s Carpenter Ranch in northwest Colorado. They live on a reclaimed industrial property in a house heated by the sun in Salida.
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The High Country Speaker Series is a partnership between the Eagle Valley Library District and Walking Mountains to bring environmental speakers to our community. Other speakers in this series include:
Feb. 8: Gary Ferguson, nature, science and adventure author will share his presentation “The Promise of the Wild”.
Feb. 22: Bernd Heinrich, author, biologist and ultra runner will speak about “Movement, Mentoring and Emotion”.
Mar. 7: John Calderazzo and SueEllen Campbell, both Professors of English and Founders and Directors of “Changing Climates” at Colorado State University will present “High Journeys: Mountains and Volcanoes in Nature and Mind”.
The High Country Speaker Series is free and open to the public. Reservations are recommended but not required. The Bookworm of Edwards will be on hand to sell copies of Tweit’s memoir. For more information, or to make a reservation, call the Avon Public Library at 970-949-6797.
