When Barry Truitt, Nature Conservancy biologist and historian of all things Eastern Shore, took artist Suzanne Stryk to a windswept island that’s now home to birds and nesting turtles, it was to tell stories of a vanished human community that once inhabited the island. She got goose bumps listening.

Stryk was on the Eastern Shore as part of a journey through the Commonwealth, having been inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s book “Notes on the State of Virginia.”

The title caught her attention, drawing her to the idea of notes as casual jottings, and also to the layers of meaning attached to state, from actual geographic boundaries to a state of being. “I’m all about exploring specific places, so Virginia, incredibly rich and varied as it is from the coast to the mountains, inspired me,” she explains. “After reading Jefferson’s book, I became intrigued by the historical arc between his perception of the region and my own over 200 years later.”

That journey resulted in a series of 26 multimedia collages composed of dead bugs, tourist pamphlets, road maps, pressed leaves, rusty farm equipment, animal bones and handwritten directions, all arranged over United States Geological Survey topographic maps. It was also titled “Notes on the State of Virginia.”

After the series was installed at the Taubman Museum of Art in 2013, she realized how much she wanted to share some of the backstories behind the artwork. Though she’d not been published before, a book seemed like the logical outlet. “Fortunately, I’d made scads of notes during my travels and in the studio,” she says. “Those, along with my maps, books, and sketches, gave me more than enough material to aid my memory.”

Her first book, “The Middle of Somewhere: An Artist Explores the Nature of Virginia,” will be the subject of a talk and book signing on Thursday, Nov. 2 at the Library of Virginia, the final installment of the 2023 Carole Weinstein Author series. It’s the creatures in their habitats and the people she met throughout her journey that became characters in the book, a tapestry of essays, sketches and ephemera. Stryk’s multimedia collages bring the narrative to life.

Memories of childhood

Writing may be a new endeavor for Stryk, but art-making is not. She has a fuzzy memory of being a 4-year-old painting outside on her family’s patio. “I recall being mesmerized by making colorful shapes on a white surface while watching insects crawl over it,” she says.

Her close attention to small lives like those bugs, as well as salamanders and a whole array of little creatures that she mentions in the book, is rooted in her girlhood. She was that child who kept mice and turtles as pets and was fascinated by wild things. “When I was about 7, I remember finding a stag beetle in a window well. I was shocked and amazed by those big pincers,” she says. “But I feared telling friends about it because a ‘meh’ or a ‘yuk’ response would have been so deflating.”

“I experienced an intense feeling of being lost while finding my way and could anything be more like life than that?” she asks. “So early on, I saw maps as both practical guides and beautiful metaphors for our experience of life and art.”

In the preface of “The Middle of Somewhere,” Stryk writes that a map’s “merger of the factual with the evocative plucks a chord deep inside me.” It’s an appreciation she developed as a teenager in the 1960s when she took a train from Chicago to attend an ecology workshop in Southern Illinois. After the staff took their luggage, they gave her and two other campers a compass, a topographic map, a few tips on orienteering, and dropped them off in the woods.

They were expected to figure out how to get to the camp located a few miles away. “I experienced an intense feeling of being lost while finding my way and could anything be more like life than that?” she asks. “So early on, I saw maps as both practical guides and beautiful metaphors for our experience of life and art.”

Her Jefferson-inspired journey took her on a night excursion into the Dragon Run wetland, an experience she remembers as “truly magical.” She says she’ll never forget waking before sunrise to glimpse the red-cockaded woodpecker with Piney Grove steward Bobby Clontz. Another memorable experience was wandering around Jefferson’s Poplar Forest retreat where he wrote most of the “Notes on the State of Virginia,” which filled her with a profound sense of time passing. Each of these is featured in a chapter of the book.

Although she’s lived in Virginia for almost 40 years, longer than anywhere else, Stryk believes that not being a native Virginian gives her a different eye when experiencing it up close. “Often, being used to a place hinders seeing it freshly,” she says.

Learning about the other lives, human and not, with which we share the planet is the most satisfying part of her artistic journey. “I’m humbled and awed by the inventiveness of creation. And here’s the paradox: Nothing I could make could come close to the genius of nature,” she says. “Yet, I can’t think of any better way to live than to explore it and make something of it.”

There will be a book talk and signing with Suzanne Stryk on “The Middle of Somewhere: An Artist Explores the Nature of Virginia” on Thursday, Nov. 2 at 6 p.m. at the Library of Virginia, 800 East Broad Street. Lva.virginia.gov