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.
Part One: Navigating Personal Grief
Part Two: Navigating Climate Grief
Introduces the radical new concept of
THE RECONCILED ECOLOGICAL SELF.
Opening to Climate Grief:
A Workbook Companion
to Hold Fast
A spacious, structured 140-page, letter-format 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.
Designed to help the reader settle a broken heart.
Gentle prompts encourage grief to arise and be addressed in gracious and heartfelt ways.
Ample space for drawing, writing, and pasting things into the Workbook.
Creeksong: One Woman Sings
the Climate Blues
REVISED EDITION, 2026
A poetic exploration of climate grief, beginning with a tortured childhood and featuring Wendy’s powerful midlife initiatory journey in rural Australia.
Weaves song, story, and ethical reflection into an invitation to nurture an ethic of caring for Nature and feel, witness, and respond to the losses and challenges of climate breakdown.
Foreword by Professor Peter Newman, AO, Transport Lead Author, International Panel on Climate Change
Creeksong: One Woman Sings
the Climate Blues
AUDIOBOOK
A 12-hour immersive Audiobook version of the whole Creeksong book.
Contains 400 pieces of music and 900 special effects.
Narrated by the author, directed and produced by Christopher Baudat, in a purpose-built studio in his home in 2023.
If you want to know how it felt to live in the tropical Australian bush for a year, please do check out my audiobook! And listen to what two seniors with lots of love and zero experience can create in a home recording studio!
THE WILD EDGE OF PLANNING: Field Notes from the Frontiers of Community Practice
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.
Forthcoming May 11, 2027
New Village Press, New York.
Creative Community Planning: Transformative Engagement Methods for Working at the Edge
Earthscan/Routledge, 2010.
Wendy Sarkissian with Dianna Hurford and Christine Wenman. Winner, 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.
Wendy Sarkissian with Nancy Hofer, Yollana Shore, Steph Vajda, and Cathy Wilkinson. Winner, 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.
Wendy ith Wiwik Bunjamin-Mau, Andrea Cook, Kelvin Walsh, and Steph Vajda. Winner, 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 Design Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing
photo of Wendy and Clare to come 1986
By Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissian, with Sheena Wilson and Donald Perlgut. University of California Press, 1986. Illustrated paperback, 336 pages.
Now also available as an ebook.
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. This “evergreen” book remains a standard reference for housing designers, planners, developers, and housing authorities worldwide.