Why I Write

My relationship with writing is lifelong. I journaled from an early age and found deep comfort in reading — and somewhere in that quiet back-and-forth between pen and page, between someone else’s words and my own, a partnership took root.

I write to respond. When a creative idea finds me — as it did with my children’s books — writing is how I answer it. It’s how I say yes to what’s asking to be made.

Some writing arrives as memory. From Northern Lights to American Dreams: From Childhood to the Edge of Adulthood is my autobiography — the story of growing up between two worlds, between the long bright summers of Iceland and the wide, complicated promise of America. Writing that book was an act of excavation. I had to go back in order to understand how I became who I am, and how those two landscapes — so different from each other — shaped everything that followed.

My nature writing is something more like a calling. Through books like Rebuilding Nature: Yard by Yard, I want to share what I’ve learned about what is happening in the natural world around us — and to invite readers to redirect their energy toward response and care. Nature is asking something of us. Writing is one way I try to listen, and to pass that listening on.

But writing also gives something back. It returns to me the space to process my thoughts, to sit with what I don’t yet understand, and to learn — sometimes from my own sentences — what I actually believe.

That exchange, I think, is why I keep coming back to the page.

If you’d like to read along, you can find my ongoing reflections on Substack.