I wrote a book!

It has been fairly quiet around here, and with good reason. I wrote a book!

Tracking Giants: Big trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest is a travel memoir about searching for the Champion trees of BC. It comes out in May 2023 with Greystone Books. Please visit this link to learn more and preorder.

A funny, deeply relatable book about one woman’s quest to track some of the world’s biggest trees.

When she first moved back west after nearly a decade away, Amanda Lewis was an overachieving, burned-out book editor most familiar with trees as dead blocks of paper. A dedicated “indoorswoman,” she could barely tell a birch from a beech. But that didn’t stop her from pledging to visit all of the biggest trees in British Columbia, a Canadian province known for its rugged terrain and gigantic trees.

The “Champion” trees on Lewis’s ambitious list ranged from mighty Western red-cedars to towering arbutus (madrone). They lived on remote islands and at the center of dense forests. The only problem? Well, there were many…

Climate change and a pandemic aside, Lewis’s lack of wilderness experience, the upsetting reality of old-growth logging, the ever-changing nature of trees, and the pressures of her one-year timeframe complicated her quest. Burned out again—and realizing that her “checklist” approach to life might be the problem—Lewis reframed her search for trees to something humbler and more meaningful: getting to know forests in an interconnected way.

Weaving in insights from writers and artists, Lewis uncovers what we’re really after when we pursue the big things—revealing that sometimes it’s the smaller joys, the mindsets we have, and the companions we’re with that make us feel more connected to the natural world.