“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also – if you love them enough.”

~George Washington Carver

Welcome to the Providence Lane Homestead Field Guides – Writer’s Edition.

If you’re looking to build a framework for observation, for writing and journaling, for land stewardship and deeper observation, this is a great place to start.

The Writer’s Edition was born from a simple conviction: that good writing begins long before the first sentence. It begins in observation — in the tilt of light across a pasture, in the slow swirl of mist in the hollows of a woodland, in the way a flock shifts before a storm.

Good writing begins in attention.

These guides are structured, but not rigid. They offer prompts, seasonal cues, observation exercises, and space — generous space — to record what you see, hear, measure, and wonder about. Feel free to write, to jot, to sketch.

The Field Guides are meant to be taken outside. To be in the barn. Toted to the fenceline. To lay open on the kitchen table at dusk. They are built to be shared — to build community with people who share your passion. Each exercise includes resources for digging deeper, books and articles you can use to prompt discussion and study groups, book clubs and conservation conversations.

Built into seasons, each guide invites you to:

• Slow down and catalogue what is actually present.
• To cultivate the discipline of quiet
• Track change over time — in land, weather, animals, and yourself.
• Strengthen the muscles of discipline and description before you reach for interpretation.
• Build a personal archive of lived experience.

Because writing rooted in lived observation carries a different authority. It is specific, embodied and honest.

Whether you steward land, tend animals, grow food, or simply wish to sharpen your powers of perception, the Field Guides offer a practice: one that builds skill over time — skill as currency, attention as wealth.

This is not about productivity, it’s about fidelity – to place, to season and to the small, revealing details most of us rush past.

If you’ve ever stood at a fence and thought, I don’t want to forget this, the Providence Lane Field Guides – Writer’s Edition are for you.

For multiple copies or custom bundles, send me a note — I’m happy to work something out.

Why Me?

I’ve spent my adult life learning how to see and how to ask questions. As a journalist and editorial writer, that meant listening carefully and distilling complexity into truth. As a sheep farmer and land steward, it means tracking weather, pasture, animals, and change over time. Over the years, I’ve written for a wide range of publications – from newspapers, websites and magazines to corporate communications. I’ve written in hotel rooms, in fields and sitting on the forest floor while helicopters with swinging water bags thudded overhead. I’ve written for money and I’ve written for sanity. I’ve told stories my whole life. The Field Guides sit where all that experience overlaps, a structured, practical tool built from years of paying attention.