I have worked a wide variety of jobs including jazz musician, journalist, gas station attendant, beer bottler, college field instructor, and river guide - not necessarily in that order. These days I am mostly writing and speaking, and wandering in wild places when I can.

When I first began publishing books in the mid 1990s, I lived nowhere. For seven years I had no residence or phone number, slept in the back of a truck or in the wilderness, and worked seasonally as a guide and field instructor. My first few books were typed in bars, libraries, and laundromats.

Since then, I have written several other books and my work has appeared in a number of anthologies. I have written for the LA Times, New York Times, Natural History, Orion, Outside, Audubon, Sierra, High Country News, and Mountain Gazette. I am also a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. After a live radio report from lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001, the Washington Post called me one of the only sane voices heard on that day. It is good to be called sane now and then.

I am deeply grateful that my writing has been well received. I won the Spirit of the West Award for my body of work, an honor I share with the likes of Wallace Stegner, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Hillerman, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Terry Tempest Williams. I am also recipient of the Colorado Book Award. Twice my books have made the Book Sense 76 list, and have been listed as top books of the year by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

My writing continues at a frenetic pace, the cab of my truck littered with receipts and envelopes scratched upon with illegible words. But this a mere byproduct, verbiage left over from experiences had on the land, raw encounters among mountain lions, boulders, water holes, and drifting thunderstorms.

I have always liked to write letters, and people often would say to me, "Why don't you write books?" My first one, On the Day You Were Born, came unexpectedly as the result of a difficult pregnancy with our only child, Calla. Early in the pregnancy, when things were at their darkest, I asked a nurse at the hospital to bring me some paper so I could write down all the things on our earth that would welcome my daughter, if she would just get here. Later, after her safe arrival, I took this jumble of words and scribbled drawings and began to turn them into the book that became On the Day You Were Born.

Now I write and illustrate books full-time. My pictures are collages, so I am still putting bits of things together, just as I did as a young girl. I usually write the text first, and then create the pictures. But with Out of the Ocean, my story about growing up beside the sea, I wrote and made pictures at the same time, and each helped the other along.

I carry a small journal with me everywhere I go, and it acts as my "butterfly net," helping me to capture ideas that fly through my brain. The idea for Miss Alaineus, A Vocabulary Disaster came along after my daughter said one night, "Mom, today I figured out that miscellaneous is not a person." I chuckled for days, made a note in my journal, and slowly built the story around her wonderful mistake.

A sequel to that book grew differently. For seven years I collected a large picture journal of all things pertaining to water. Photographs, poems, writings, sculptures, copies of science text were all entered in this scrapbook. Slowly a series of facts began to shape themselves into what became the picture book, The Incredible Water Show. This is the wonder of making a picture book -sometimes a story begins with words, and sometimes the inspiration comes from a collection of pictures. Now I am trying a very different kind of journal where I take trips in my canoe and then share each river adventure on my website. Visit River Journal to see what it looks like. Maybe someday it will become a book!

2009:

Jack Loeffler, Lore of the Land Board Member, is a bioregional aural historian, producer, writer, sound collage artist, and musician. Since 1964, he has conducted field recordings west of the 100th meridian, founding the Peregrine Arts Sound Archive in 1967 to be the repository for his professional work. His archive now holds thousands of hours of recordings of interviews, music and natural habitat, and contains well over 3,000 songs of indigenous and traditional peoples. His primary concern is restoration and preservation of habitat focusing on the relationships of indigenous cultures to respective habitats, and the role of cultural diversity in attempting to solve the dilemmas now facing humankind.
Loeffler has produced over 300 documentary programs for radio, plus scores of soundtracks, albums of music from diverse genres, films, videos, folk music festivals, museum sound collages, and books. Selected radio series include: La Musica de los Viejitos; Southwest Sound Collage; Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute; Bioregional Folklore and Music of Tohono O'odham, Yaqui, Anglo, and Mexican Folk Musicians; Moving Waters - The Colorado River and the West; and The Lore of the Land.
He has authored five books: Headed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts, 1989; La Musica de los Viejitos including 3-CD set, with Katherine Loeffler and Enrique Lamadrid, 1999; Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey, 2002; Survival Along the Continental Divide, 2008; and Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habitat, 2008. He is currently working on several projects, including the Thinking Like a Watershed aural history project.
He is the recipient of a 2008 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the 2009 Edgar Lee Hewett Award for Outstanding Public Service from the New Mexico Historical Society.

2008:

In the course of a twenty-year friendship Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler shared hundreds of campfires, hiked thousands of miles, and talked endlessly about the meaning of life. To read Loeffler's account of his best pal's life and work is to join in their friendship.

"Ed Abbey and Jack Loeffler were like Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Loeffler delivers his friend, warts and all on a platter full of reverence and irreverence and carefully researched factual information, interspersed with hearty laughter and much serious consideration of all life's Great Questions. Jack's story elucidates and demythifies the Abbey legend, giving us powerful flesh and blood instead." John Nichols

In the spring of 2008, Survival Along the Continental Divide by Jack Loeffler will be released by the University of New Mexico Press. In the autumn, Jacks latest book, Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habitat will be released by the Museum of New Mexico Press. His latest radio series, The Lore of the Landhas recently been made available via the NPR satellite and Public Radio Exchange. Jack Loeffler is a writer, ethnographer, researcher, and radio correspondent.