Dianne Ackerman

“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well“. 

Dianne Ackerman

By Tracy Schruder

I’m absolutely captivated by Dianne Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses—it’s a sensory masterpiece that completely transformed my approach to writing. Her exquisite exploration of how we experience the world through sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell is like a key unlocking hidden doors in my mind.

I’d love to meet her, not just to thank her for the gift of her writing, but to explore the world alongside her.

I Imagine wandering through a foggy, frosty morning with Dianne, where the air is so thick with mist it almost feels alive.

The world is hushed, every sound muffled, and the light filters through the fog in shimmering silver threads.

The ground crunches beneath our feet, the cold seeping into our toes as we breathe in the icy air.

The light flickering before my eyes. The trees, skeletal and etched with frost, stretch toward the soft radiance of the rising sun. Every branch, every twig, is tipped with diamonds of ice, shimmering like a thousand tiny prisms.

The sky is a pale, watery blue, and the world feels suspended in this fragile, crystalline moment.

Red, blue, yellow waving along the tree line… The colours are muted now, but as the sun climbs higher, they’ll burst forth like whispers turned to shouts. For now, though, everything is white, frozen in icy, prickly stems formed from the morning fog, thick enough to breathe.

Her book helped me become a better writer by teaching me to slow down, to truly feel the world around me—to notice the way light dances across a leaf, the scent of damp earth after rain, the texture of bark beneath my fingers. It’s a reminder that our senses are portals to memory, to emotion, to the deepest parts of ourselves.

To sit with Dianne Ackerman and talk about these things? About the alchemy of turning experience into art? That would be a gift.