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:
One Woman Sings the Climate Blues
Looking for the companion audiobook?
In 1992, Wendy Sarkissian spent a year alone in remote northern Australia, living beside an ephemeral creek in a small patch of remnant rainforest. What began as exile became a midlife journey of initiation. This revised edition of Wendy’s 2023 eco-memoir traces that transformative year: the fires, the cyclone, the singing creek that gave her back her creativity, and the slow greening of her ecological soul. Weaving journal entries, poems, and ethical reflection, Creeksong is the story of a woman who went into the wilderness broken and came out singing. It is, above all, a love letter to the living Earth.
This book is also available as a 12-hour immersive audiobook, featuring authentic bush sounds, 400 pieces of evocative music, an original song, and 900 special effects.
Wendy Sarkissian was my doctoral student thirty years ago, when she first asked whether planners could be encouraged to truly care for Nature. In Hold Fast, she asks a harder question still: whether we can grieve, honestly and together, both the people and the Earth we have lost. I recognize in this book a necessary companion: one that recognizes the importance of climate grief yet never abandons hope.
Peter Newman AO
John Curtin Distinguished Professor, Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute, Perth, Western Australia; Lead Author for Transport, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Wendy Sarkissian’s original concept of the Reconciled Ecological Self is one of the most important psychological and ethical concepts to emerge in this century. This book, Hold Fast, is an incomparable gift to a grieving world. Perhaps it is even the Manual for Living with Defeat that Leonard Cohen would have written had his muse allowed.
John Seed OAM
Deep ecologist, founder of the Rainforest Information Centre, Australia