I don’t have to be an “expert” to write my truths…
Susan Tweit joins Cave of the Heart and answers 5 questions on self-trust
Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.
A plant ecologist by training,
began her career studying grizzly bear habitat—collecting and dissecting bear poop—mapping historic wildfires, and researching big sagebrush. She turned to writing after realizing that she loved the stories behind the data more than collecting those data. Tweit has written 13 books on the nature of life and our place in it, along with hundreds of magazine articles, newspaper columns, and essays. Her latest book, Bless the Birds: Living With Love in a Time of Dying, a memoir about rising to our best in the worst times, won the Sarton Award for memoir and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. Tweit has taught writing workshops around the country, coached writers, served as a juror for a variety of fellowships and awards, and reviewed manuscripts for publishers and agents. When she is not writing, Susan re-stories unloved houses and blighted ecosystems, plant by plant and place by place. Tweit’s work is driven by terraphilia, and her passion for healing and re-storying this earth, and we who share the planet. She writes and re-stories from a small house under a wide sky in the high desert of northern New Mexico. She also writes the newsletter Practicing Terraphilia with Susan J Tweit.Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.
I’m at my desk in the corner of my bedroom in my house on the open prairie outside Santa Fe. Through the window, I hear ravens chattering; a small breeze rustles the aspen leaves of the cluster of trees at the corner of my house and stirs the clapper of my temple gong to rub against the brass disk, making a deep thrumming sound. I can feel the warm sunlight coming through the windowpane on my jeans; I can smell the resiny fragrance of the nearby piñon pine.
Childhood
Q: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?
I was both. I loved being outside, climbing the trees in my yard, racing barefoot through the grass after my brother, smelling the flowers in my mother’s garden; or, not barefoot, riding horseback through fragrant sagebrush, backpacking and hiking mountain trails and soaking my feet in icy streams. I also loved escaping into a book, immersing myself in worlds fantastical or real, exploring places and times I would never know in my everyday life. In summer, when my family was off wandering the West on our months-long camping and backpacking trips, I would find a sunny spot on a boulder in the midst of a sea of turpentiney sagebrush or a shady spot under a tree in the mountains and read for hours, breathing in the pungence of sun-warmed pine trees. In winter, I often curled up with a book on the bench in our den, with its view of the backyard through tall windows. Both are still important to me–feeling the earth under my feet and the wind on my skin, and reading as a way to experience new worlds.
Influences
Q: How do you recognize when someone or something is a positive influence on your writing process and self-trust? What changes inside you and on the page?
I was diagnosed with a potentially fatal autoimmune condition in my early 20s, and because I do not respond well to pharmaceuticals and conventional treatment, I learned to listen to and trust my inner voice as a way of healing and living with my particular health. Sometimes I hear that voice in words or see it as images, sometimes that “voice” is simply a sensation in my gut. When I know what I am hearing or reading or learning is a positive influence, I very often hear that voice, or just feel it. And as I integrate what I am learning, that voice comes through on the page or in my teaching. Each influence is filtered through my inner knowing (as you aptly put it!) and integrated through my non-verbal understanding before it comes out as something I understand and can communicate.
Creative Spark
Q: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?
I literally hear it in my head. And sometimes I will just “free write” by talking into the voice memos app on my phone to capture the idea, and then later listen and transcribe it to the (virtual) page. Ideas usually go right into my daily journal, which I open first thing after yoga and my 2.5-mile walk every morning. It’s my place to just write about what’s happening in my life—vent, whine, or celebrate, or just note the full moon, which wildflowers are blooming or birds I see or hear. My journal is my personal writing, not something I would ever share, but it’s important as part of my creative incubation process.
I am known as a lyrical and also precise writer (I’m a scientist and a creative writer), and lately, I’ve been consciously working on developing more of an informal storytelling voice. So I’ve started to use the voice memos app when I get stuck writing or am playing with a new idea, as a way to free myself from obsessing over every word and wanting to be perfect. It’s fascinating how using voice memos unlocks a part of my creative brain that sitting at a keyboard doesn’t access. Working at the keyboard I tend to be a plodding, methodical writer, laying down each word carefully before moving on, and am known for my combination of lyricism and scientific accuracy. Writing out loud by speaking into my voice memo app gives me a freer, more extemporaneous "voice," more like oral storytelling. Speech is a very powerful way of communicating and it feels more immediate and inviting in some ways than words on a page. I want to translate that feeling onto the page in my writing.
Writing Process
Q: Were there any habits or beliefs that you had to let go of in order to more deeply trust your writing process?
I was born in the 1950s, a decade before there was even a whisper of a women’s movement, and I’m female. Fortunately, I come from a family tradition of women as independent and creative (my mom had a career outside the home; one of my great-grandmothers was a successful artist and founder of the Carmel Arts Colony in California; another was a successful and well-published writer whose work was featured in Sunset Magazine and local newspapers in the late 1800s and early 1900s). But still… The 1950s were all about women as pretty and modest and not drawing attention to themselves. Their careers outside the home (if they had them) were subsumed by their husband’s careers. So first I had to learn that being successful meant what I wanted it to mean, not anyone else’s definition, and I didn’t have to compromise about going where I wanted to go with my work. (That one took me a long time to learn!)
Second, I had to let go of the idea that I don’t have to be an “expert” to write my truths. As someone raised in a family of highly educated people whose careers were in the sciences and the arts, I had to learn to trust what I have experienced and what I know in my heart and spirit to be true, whether or not I have an advanced degree, a certificate, or other letters after my name. Unlike my parents and some of my other relatives, I did not earn an advanced degree–I went to college and graduated with a degree in botany and photography, but learned far more about plant communities and the interactions that green and animate this earth from the fieldwork I have done over the years than I ever learned in several tries at graduate school. Nor did I earn an MFA before becoming a freelance writer. I had to learn to trust myself as a scientist and writer–on my own merits–before my writing and my work restoring blighted ecosystems really flourished.
Resources
Q: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?
As Sherrie York, an artist/printmaker friend says, “Outside fuels my insides.” The community of the land, what we call nature, is my refuge, my succor and my inspiration. The more-than-human lives that weave this numinous planet are my people–especially the plants native to the region I call home, the sagebrush sea of the intermountain West.
Every morning, I do yoga to knit body and spirit together and alleviate the pain that comes from living with Lupus, and then I set out for a 2.5-mile walk through the high desert around my home outside Santa Fe. I call that walk my meditation, and in a very real way it is. I quiet my mind by greeting the native plants I pass, and thanking them for their lives, their wisdom, their company, and for weaving the landscape and breathing with us.
As I have written in other contexts, plants are our “breathing buddies.” (I borrowed that phrase from the poet Clifford Burke in his poem Whulj.) Plants exhale the oxygen we oxygen-breathing lives require for living; they inhale the carbon dioxide we and our industrial processes exhale. We are linked by breath in a reciprocal relationship, part of the cell-deep “terraphilia,” an innate affection for and connection to this planet and Earth’s web of life that makes us human.
Practicing that terraphilia every day is what inspires and enriches not just my writing life, but my life, period.
Next up
A conversation with my editor about newsletter first impressions, more inspiring Cave of the Heart questionnaires, and a vulnerable essay about surviving the pandemic with dissociative identity disorder. Subscribe to follow along.
Join Susan in the comments section today
After reading about Susan’s work, have you been inspired to incorporate a relationship with the Earth as part of your writing practice?
Do you live in a city or a more urban setting? If so, have you found any ways to reconnect with the Earth as a means of bolstering your writing life?
This was such a beautiful reflection that made my heart go back to hikes through the arid landscapes of Colorado. I now live in Bogotá, and while this city of 13 million is nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains, it's hard to get to them often. Group hiking days and walks in parks are some of my only time to escape the concrete jungle. However, my apartment has a stunning view overlooking the city under the wide open sky. I connect with nature when I do yoga in my living room at sunset, and the pinks and oranges spill across the sky, over my neighborhood's buildings, and through the window. It also makes me feel part of the community around me, even though most may be strangers. I do think this sense of connectedness energizes my writing too.
Also, I find it so fascinating that nearly every author you've interviewed in this series has answered the first question in the same way - "Both." We writers are a unique breed aren't we? Both burying our noses in books and running around outside - and both bringing us in touch with different worlds.
This was wonderful. Thank you. <3 I was just listening for the umpteenth time yesterday to Krista Tippett's wonderful, extended interview with Mary Oliver on the On Being podcast. If there's a patron saint of something like terraphilia, it's got to be Mary. Like many writers, she constantly walked about with a small notebook, but I'm liking this idea of using voice recording apps. There definitely is a way that the mind flows and the voice is different, and I need to start capturing that consistently. Thank you for the prod, Susan.
Gosh, I love this series, Amanda!