What I Saw

My sister and nephew love to joke about my love of plants and animals – from the hairy tarantula and foreboding rattlesnake to the mesquite tree and the mariposa lily. I’m okay with their banter. In fact, I consider it an honor to be labeled “Mother Earth,” as some of my friends jokingly call me (they’re city folks, so anyone who doesn’t live near concrete is considered a ‘tree hugger’ in their books).

Because when I step outside my front door in southern Arizona’s breathtaking Sonoran Desert, I can appreciate what’s in front of me.

But I’m more than my Mother Earth persona. I’m much more than the gal who gets excited when encountering a new insect. Or bird. Or mammal. Or wildflower. Or rock. Or snake. Or lizard.

I’m also a full-time freelance writer and novelist. My novel, Bedside, was named a semi-finalist in the 2011 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Writing Competition for a novel-in-progress, and my magazine articles have won numerous awards with Writer’s Digest, IABC and the International Academy of the Visual Arts.

So, with this blog, I’d like to combine my two passions: writing and nature. Nature provides inspiration for all my writing – fiction and nonfiction. But more than that, I hope to inspire you – writer, nature enthusiast, or none of the above – to “see” the things around you … perhaps differently, perhaps with new meaning, perhaps for the first time. There is something to see everywhere you go. My blog will focus on those things that I see, that inspire me – in nature and otherwise.

So if you’ve never seen a tailless whip scorpion, red coachwhip snake, windscorpion, Gila Monster, red-spotted toad, bobcat, or great horned owl – climb aboard. Your guide is a northwestern Pennsylvania-born girl who has fallen hopelessly in love with the desert. And life.

Melissa Crytzer Fry