During my first class meeting each quarter at UCLA, where I teach literature and composition, I ask students briefly to introduce themselves, and share a bit about the place they most consider home. This may be their birthplace, the town or city where they spent their formative years, or their adopted home, perhaps near the UCLA campus itself. My own hometown, Bakersfield, California, will always be a real anchor in my life. It’s where my mom and sister and nephew still reside and where memories of dense tule fog and country music streaming from the radio remain dear.

But after spending the last couple of years researching a book on wildlife habitats and travel patterns, I think about other home regions that have shaped me, none more profoundly than the coast redwood forests of far Northern California.

There my father, a professor of botany, worked several summers as a State Parks Naturalist, allowing me and my sister to spend part of our childhoods amidst the fantasias of ferns, majestic Roosevelt elk, and brightly-hued banana slugs that congregate around the tallest trees on Earth. Here is where I developed a lifelong love of nature, walking through dimly-lit cathedrals of redwoods during the day and reading nature-themed books at night—and at times penning little tales about the campgrounds, forests, and wild creatures I was getting to know so well. Later, as a student of English literature and, eventually, as a university instructor, I gravitated towards authors who found joy, spiritual sustenance, and their most authentic selves in the natural world.

Poets of the British Romantic period helped me see most clearly just how magically the written word can conjure nature’s features (land- and waterscapes) and creatures—and thus inspire us to love and want to protect them.

Though my own writing has pretty much followed a scholarly path, researching my first book for younger readers has introduced me to places and animals (white-lipped peccaries! Spade-foot toads!) as remarkable as any dreamed up by the poets I’ve spent my life reading and teaching.

Writing Wildlife Crossings of Hope: Connecting Creatures Around the Globe has made me think much more deeply about habitats, our own and those of the wild beings we want to protect.

And, as a bonus, this project took me back to my own most treasured home-ground beneath the towering, fog-encompassed redwood trees of California’s northernmost coast.