Creeksong:
One Woman Sings
The Climate Blues
A poetic exploration of climate grief, featuring a powerful midlife initiatory journey in rural Australia. Weaves song, story, and ethical reflection into an invitation to feel, witness, and respond to the losses of climate breakdown.
Creeksong Audiobook
Hold Fast:
Navigating Personal
and Climate Grief with a Reconciled Heart
A memoir and healing guide that draws on the sudden death of Wendy’s husband in 2016 and her decades of environmental ethics work to offer a model for navigating and reconciling both personal and climate grief.
Opening to Climate Grief:
A Workbook Companion
to Hold Fast
A spacious, structured workbook companion to Hold Fast that guides readers through embodied practices, reflective prompts, and creative invitations for opening to the many aspects of the pain of climate breakdown and helping the reader settle a broken heart.
The Wild Edge of Planning: Field Notes from the Wilds of Community Practice
The Wild Edge of Planning: Field Notes from the Frontiers of Community Practice is a story-rich memoir of five decades in community planning, written by one of the field’s most outspoken feminist practitioners. Beginning with a brutal baptism by fire in 1960s New Haven urban renewal, Wendy Sarkissian traces how witnessing organized destruction and token “public participation” pushed her to spend the rest of her career experimenting with more ethical, community-oriented ways of working.
Creative Community Planning: Transformative Engagement Methods for Working at the Edge
Earthscan/Routledge, 2010. With Dianna Hurford and Christine Wenman. Winner of the 2010 Award for Excellence, Planning Institute of Australia.
Creative Community Planning provides clear access to emerging innovations in artistic, narrative, embodied and technological methods. Reflecting on the wide continuum of participatory practice, the authors explore the frontiers of community engagement within a fresh sustainability framework.
Kitchen Table Sustainability: Practical Recipes for Community Engagement with Sustainability
Earthscan/Routledge, 2008. With Nancy Hofer, Yollana Shore, Steph Vajda, and Cathy Wilkinson. Winner of the 2010 Award for Excellence, Planning Institute of Australia.
Kitchen Table Sustainability takes sustainability out of the ivory towers of universities, government departments and planners to the kitchen tables of the world. This practical guide distils decades of wisdom from community planning, engagement and sustainability practice internationally into a user-friendly and engaging book that is both inspirational and packed with hands-on tools.
SpeakOut: The Step-by-Step Guide to SpeakOuts and Community Workshops
Earthscan/Routledge, 2009. With Wiwik Bunjamin-Mau, Andrea Cook, Kelvin Walsh, and Steph Vajda. Winner of the 2010 Award for Excellence, Planning Institute of Australia.
SpeakOut is the product of two decades of successful practice by internationally acclaimed community planning specialists. It introduces the SpeakOut: an innovative, interactive drop-in engagement process, and provides hands-on, systematic guidance and detailed checklists for managing community engagement processes.
Housing As If People Mattered:
Site Planning Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing
Housing as if People Mattered: Site Design Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing. University of California Press, 1986. With Clare Cooper Marcus. Ebook 2023.
An award-winning classic in planning and housing design. This practical, research-based guide presents guidelines for the site design of low-rise, medium-density family housing, drawing on extensive post-occupancy research. It remains a standard reference for housing designers, planners, developers, and housing authorities worldwide. Now also available as an ebook.