Welcome to The Wild Spectacle Podcast, a flash-cast series with host Janisse Ray about ongoing and meaningful participation in a world that matters.
Episode 11 | Susan Cerulean | Being with Shorebirds
I want to welcome you to the show with a very special guest, the writer and my dear friend Susan Cerulean. Susan and I met in the mid-80s in Tallahassee, Florida, started a writing group, and basically still carry it on with a decades-long conversation about nature writing. In 2006 she published Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites, which was named an Editors’ Choice title by Audubon magazine. Her book Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change was followed by I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, which Terry Tempest Williams called “an elegant memoir of devotion and imagination.” Susan has worked ceaselessly on behalf of wildness—she is especially drawn to the coast and to birds.
Highlights of the Story
2:20—Susan explains her place on the wild chart.
3:40—She talks about her book I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird.
4:45—This was a day when her father was in hospice and she was getting a “breather of a day.”
5:56—The bird in the middle was a red knot.
6:20—A short reading from the book.
7:40—Beside the dying bird’s head was a sanderling. At the rear flank was a second red knot. Nearby were two lesser yellowlegs.
9:00—These four birds were vigil birds.
10:30—“They were just being with.”
11:44—“We all continued to breathe.”
12:00—Shorebirds tie our planet together with their journeys.
13:15—Janisse talks about two words that particularly moved her.
14:08—Susan names the common spectacles she sees around her home.
14:49—The day cedar waxwings arrive & the day they leave.
15:10—A mulberry tree is a place of gathering.
16:16—The word that names Susan’s role in the world.
18:07—Think about your place as a bioregion. How does the place define herself?
20:50—Final advice.
“Think about epiphany. Think about change. Think about the moments that make your face burn, your fingers tingle. Wild Spectacle is about those shocks, encounters that shift the way we see the world and ourselves in it…If the water we drink is maybe older than the sun, then ancient magic pounds inside our skins, too. So speak it. Tell it forth. Cry aloud and call it back home.”
-Joni Tevis, author of The Wet Collection and The World is On Fire
Thank You for Listening
If you like what we’re doing here, give this show a thumbs-up, post it on your socials, and/or forward it to your friends.
Janisse Ray’s book Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans inspired the podcast. If you’d like a copy of the book, visit your favorite bookstore or library. Or you may order a signed copy here.
Find Janisse on Facebook at “Janisse Ray, Author” and on Instagram @janisseray_writer.
Thanks to Axletree for their beautiful music, “Clothe the Fields with Plenty,” an orchestral piece inspired by a traditional Hampshire folk song, “The Painful Plough,” from Axletree’s project “Music from a Hampshire Farm.” Thanks to the Free Music Archive.
We’re eager for new voices on the show, so if you’d like to come on and tell a story, be in touch.
Go See Some Nature
If we’re going to make a dent in changing our world, we have to understand what kind of amazements it contains. So many people begin to work on behalf of the planet because they see a natural phenomenon, large or small, that infuses them with admiration and wonder. So get out in nature. Take a friend with you. Especially a child. Go see a wild phenomenon. Amaze yourself. Connect yourself.
Ep #11 | Susan Cerulean | Being with Shorebirds