All Books
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird
A Daughter’s Memoir
Sarton Women’s Literary Award (Storyteller’s Network)
Susan Cerulean’s memoir trains a naturalist’s eye and a daughter’s heart on the lingering death of a beloved parent from dementia. At the same time, the book explores an activist’s lifelong search to be of service to the embattled natural world. During the years she cared for her father, Cerulean also volunteered as a steward of wild shorebirds along the Florida coast. Her territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where she located and protected nesting shorebirds, including least terns and American oystercatchers.
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird weaves together intimate facets of adult caregiving and the consolation of nature, detailing Cerulean’s experiences of tending to both. The natural world is the “sustaining body” into which we are born. In similar ways, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia but also the crisis of the human-caused degradation of the planet itself, a type of cultural dementia. With I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Cerulean reminds us of the loving, necessary toil of tending to one place, one bird, one being at a time.
Praise for I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird
“An elegant memoir of devotion and imagination inviting us to extend our compassion and sense of family to all species on this beautiful, broken planet we call home. This book is a wise and prescient book, an awakening.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing
“With astonishing grace, insight, and power, Susan Cerulean has written a memoir of such delicate balance and wisdom that it will forever have a hallowed place on your bookshelf. Daughter, wife, environmentalist, explorer, caretaker of humans and seashores, in I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Susan offers up vital truths just when we need them most.”
—Connie May Fowler, author of A Million Fragile Bones
“A beautiful and significant book: With compassion, keen insights, and elegant prose, Cerulean celebrates our inherent and intractable relationship with the natural world and explores the strange paradox of humanity’s disconnections.”
—Joe Hutto, author of Touching the Wild and other novels
Coming to Pass
Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change
Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction by the Florida Book Awards
For more than three decades, Susan Cerulean kayaked, hiked, scalloped, fished and counted birds on and around Dog, the St. Georges and St Vincent islands. The result: a well-received work of creative nonfiction (University of Georgia Press, 2015). Coming to Pass tells the story of this little developed necklace of the northern Gulf Coast islands. Both a field guide to a beloved and impermanent Florida landscape and a call for its protection, Susan Cerulean’s memoir chronicles the uniquely beautiful coast as it once was, as it is now, and as it may be as the sea level rises.
Praise for Coming to Pass
—Miriam Greenspan, psychotherapist and author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions: the Wisdom of Grief, Fear, & Despair
“Cerulean combines a poetic gift of expression, a naturalist’s keen eye and deep knowledge, and a lover’s passion for life. Coming to Pass is both an exuberant and intriguing celebration of a treasured landscape and an eloquent plea for people to change their ways so that these ecosystems and the precious species they contain might continue. A wonderful book—I only wish I could have put it down and gone out to take a walk on the beach with the author.”
—Roger S. Gottlieb, author of A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and our Planet’s Future and Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming
—Dave Borland, National Ecological Observatory Network
Tracking Desire
A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites
Florida Chapter of the Sierra Club Indigo Award, 2005
Swallow-tailed kites are beautiful, scissor-tailed raptors, whose flight is so buoyant and effortless that they resemble the paper kites for which they are named. Once found from Minnesota to Florida, their numbers declined alarmingly with the arrival of European settlers and the altering of the natural landscape. This nature memoir is a pilgrimage through the much-reduced homeland of the swallow-tailed kite, weaving science, family history and interior musings with the fabric of the kite’s life history.
Praise for Tracking Desire
“Obsession has rarely had a lovelier or more compelling subject that this one…Tracking Desire is at once a paean, a pilgrimage, and a penance.”
—Scott Weidensaul, author of Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds
The Book of the Everglades
Edited by Susan Cerulean
With all the spice of southern storytelling, this collection brings to light the often outlandish results of humankind’s attempts to control and redesign nature. Journalists, essayists, poets, and educators tell how the natural plumbing of the Everglades has been rerouted not only by the Army Corps of Engineers but by sugar planters, politicians, and growth. Contributing writers include Carl Hiaasen, Al Burt, and Archie Carr.
—Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Between Two Rivers
Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf
Edited by Susan Cerulean, Janisse Ray and Laura Newton
Thirty leading naturalists and writers survey the fabulous geographies they live and love—from the Red Hills of southwest Georgia to the Gulf coast of north Florida.
—Scott Weidensaul, author of Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds
The Florida Wildlife Viewing Guide
by Susan Cerulean and Ann J. Morrow
I wrote this perennial favorite, part of the national Watchable Wildlife series, with my friend Ann Morrow in the early 1990s. We traveled the entire state of Florida with our three young children in the backseat of my station wagon. Includes 128 viewing sites from the dazzling beaches of Canaveral National Seashore to the subtropical sawgrass prairies of world-famous Everglades National Park.
UnspOILed
Writers Speak for Florida’s Coast
by Susan Cerulean, Janisse Ray, and A. James Wohlpart
In this volume, 38 writers, scientists and students share their abiding love of Florida’s Gulf of Mexico coast and its sea life. UnspOILed reminds us that now is the time to shift from the oil dependent, industrial economy that is devastating our planet and driving climate change. It is time to transform our culture into a way of living in balance with the greater web of all beings, a culture based on truly sustainable lifestyles and clean, renewable energy sources.
The Wild Heart of Florida
Edited by Susan Cerulean and Jeffrey S. Ripple
Eighteen of Florida’s best-loved writers here share with you their affection for Florida’s wild side—the beautiful heart of a state under siege from development.
Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White, Al Burt, Patrick Smith, the late Archie Carr, and others evoke a Florida thick with pinewoods, alligators, and palmetto scrub; ribboned by miles of coast and dune; blessed with backcountry lakes, rivers, creeks, and springs. Strip malls and concrete cannot tame this wild Florida, but they can kill it. These essays offer passionate argument why that should not be allowed to happen.
Coming from a variety of backgrounds—fiction, journalism, poetry, and environmental writing—the writers turn their talent to one thing they have in common—a love for Florida’s natural beauty and a commitment to preserve it. Their essays—some old favorites, most appearing here for the first time—are both a celebration and a pointed reminder of what we stand to lose.