University of Georgia Press
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir
Key Metrics
- Susan Cerulean
- University of Georgia Press
- Hardcover
- 9780820357379
- 9.1 X 6.2 X 1 inches
- 0.95 pounds
- Biography & Autobiography > Personal Memoirs
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
Writer, naturalist and activist Susan Cerulean’s nature memoir Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change (University of Georgia Press, 2015) received a Gold Medal in the category of Florida Nonfiction by the Florida Book Awards. Her previous book, Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-tailed Kites (University of Georgia Press, 2005) was named Editors’ Choice by Audubon magazine (March 2005).
Cerulean directed the Red Hills Writers Project between 2004 and 2011, and edited Unspoiled: Writers Speak for Florida’s Coast, with Janisse Ray and A. James Wohlpart, in 2010. Unspoiled alerted Floridians to perils of oil drilling in the Gulf (and sold nearly 10,000 copies). With Janisse Ray and Laura Newton, she also edited Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf (RHWP, 2004). This locally-acclaimed anthology brought together personal essays written by 29 of the area’s foremost writers and naturalists.
In March 2009, she was honored by Tallahassee Community College as one of the “Women Taking the Lead to Save our Planet.”
Cerulean has written and advocated on behalf of Florida and its wildlife from her home in Tallahassee since 1981. She is a founding board member of Heart of the Earth and the Red Hills Writers Project. She designed the States Nongame and Watchable Wildlife Programs, and was named Environmental Educator of the year by the Governors Council for a Sustainable Florida in 1997.
Susan Cerulean lives in Tallahassee Florida with her husband, oceanographer and climate scientist Dr. Jeffrey Chanton. They have three grown sons.
Source: comingtopass.com
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