Creeksong: One Woman Sings the Climate Blues (2023, 2026)

Recounts a woman’s initiatory journey in wild Nature, as she confronts the harsh realities of climate breakdown and her role in causing it. It traces a lifetime of deep attachment to place, forests, creeks, and communities and her emerging ecological consciousness.

[Link to full book description / purchase page]An eco-memoir of climate grief, radical healing, and a year in a remote Australian forest.

BACK COVER

Author Bio (next to headshot)

Dr. Wendy Sarkissian is an author, environmental ethicist, and activist whose writing and advocacy focus on climate breakdown and climate grief. A retired community planner, she has received over 40 professional awards for her pioneering work in community engagement, shared through Creative Community Planning and Kitchen Table Sustainability. Her lifelong dedication continues to inspire bold, compassionate action on behalf of the Earth.

Main Back Cover Blurb (beside/under creek photo)

Creeksong: One Woman Sings the Climate Blues is a visceral, hope-infused eco-memoir for anyone asking, “How do I live with climate grief and still love the world?” In 1991, burned-out community planner Wendy Sarkissian walks away from the professional treadmill, the city, and the illusion of safety to spend a year in an off-the-grid forest community outside Darwin in Australia's tropical Top End. What begins as PhD fieldwork quickly becomes a raw midlife initiation through climate anxiety, buried trauma, and spiritual awakening, guided by dreams, birds, storms, neighbors, and a tiny ephemeral creek.

Immersed in a small remnant monsoon forest, Wendy finds her heart opening to the presence and messages of greater-than-human Nature. Resting in a shallow, rain-fed creek, she feels the forest's tender regard awaken her own self-compassion. A sacred palm witnesses as she vows herself to the service of the Earth. She emerges standing tall, an “acceptable incompetent” who sings the forest's songs, tells the truth about climate breakdown, and lets her life be measured not by career status, but by service to Nature.

This memoir does not separate inner and outer crisis. A powerful healing session exposes long-buried childhood trauma and reframes a lifetime of overwork, illness, and relationship struggle. It reveals the deepening power of healing family wounds and healing our relationships with the Earth. Wendy learns to live with snakes, cyclones, crazy people, bushfire risk, and radical fire-exclusion ecology, and discovers practical, grounded ways to stay present in the face of cascading climate threats.

In her 83rd year, Wendy revisits her transformative midlife journey with courage, humour, and tenderness. She calls each of us to care for Nature and stand steadfast for the Earth. It is never too late to begin. Creeksong speaks to climate-conscious readers, midlife and elder women, therapists, planners, spiritual seekers, and audiobook lovers who want more than slogans, but a lived, deeply human map for these times.

Includes a new Introduction by the author and a Foreword by Professor Peter Newman AO, a scientist with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).