About Erica
Official Bio
Erica Wheeler is an award-winning singer-songwriter, a TEDx speaker, a professional development trainer and a creative mentor. As an interpretive skills trainer, she works with museums, parks, and historic sites across the US – helping staff boost their storytelling skills and hone visitor engagement techniques. She has worked extensively with the National Park and has supported 45+ sites to date.
As a keynote speaker, she often talks about tourism, a sense of place, stewardship and storytelling. As a musician, she has 6 CDs to her credit. Her music has charted in the top ten on Billboard’s Gavin’s Americana Chart, and she has been interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Erica also runs creative writing workshops and retreats. Her framework centers around using a “sense of place” as the gateway to creativity, curiosity, belonging and identity.
Throughout her career, she has helped people find and craft the stories they have inside them. Her work is dedicated to helping people find deep personal connections to places so that both people and places can thrive.
Interpretive Training
"Erica provided our interpretive staff with a fresh angle on interpretation, new techniques, and the opportunity to stretch and experiment. Our interpreters strengthened and re-imagined their approach to sharing our resources with visitors. This training served as a solid foundation for our seasonal training and complimented prior training around audience-centered engagement techniques, peer coaching, and resource content.” Marsh-Billings-Rockerfeller NHP & Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site
Youth and Community
“Erica has an impressive versatility. Her warm personality and knowledge of her subject matter gave our students a gift: she empowered them to express themselves and connect to the land in a way many of them had never experienced before."
Keynotes and Seminars
"We invited Erica out for a week to help celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Big Sur Land Trust with a variety of events. Her positive impact reverberated throughout our community and continues to this day. Erica's ability to connect people and place beautifully aligned with our mission to strengthen communities and inspire stewardship" Bill Leahy, Executive Director, Big Sur Land Trust, CA
Sense of Place Writing
"Over the past year this writing group has offered a sanctuary of inspiration. As an expert writing guide, Erica ensures that we all move forward on our unique writing journeys and don’t lose our way. It wasn’t until I found “Sense of Place Writing” that I felt truly at home in a writing class. Erica is a mentor who inspires writers to experiment with their craft and to explore new territories. I haven’t had this much fun writing in a long time.” Sheila H.
Singer-Songwriter
"Her songs measure the cost of urban sprawl not in terms of species endangered, but in memories lost. Her lyrics evoke all the trails we've hiked, the streams swum, the trees climbed, and all the moments of growth enjoyed there--the silent epiphanies, the stolen kisses--without ever sounding preachy. But when she drops the truism "Your children won't know (the land) the way I did," suddenly your local zoning battle may seem a little more interesting." Yankee Magazine
A bit more about me…
I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. My Dad was a journalist, and my mother owned several gift stores, specializing in Scandinavian gifts and American Crafts. I am the youngest of four and one of my brothers. One of them is an investigative journalist for the Washington Post, and the others do things with computers I don’t understand.
I am based in the hills of western Massachusetts and live with my partner of 22 years. We live in a 125-year-old house beside a rushing stream surrounded by dairy and sugar maple farms.
I wanted to be a wildlife field biologist. In high school, I was a big bird nerd (thanks Audubon Youth Group!) The summer before college, I was awarded a scholarship through the National Science Foundation to live in Colorado. I lived in a ridgetop cabin (by myself) and studied marmots and pikas. The summer before that I went on a 30-day Biology Expedition with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Wyoming, where I learned many lifelong skills.
I do not have a favorite National Park, but I’m often asked that question! I love them all! Each one has something amazing and significant to explore.
I’ve opened shows for many of my favorite songwriters. Shawn Colvin. Indigo Girls. Ferron. Bill Morrissey. Greg Brown. I’ve played at many of my favorite festivals: Telluride, Rocky Mountain Folk Festival, and Winnipeg Folk Festival.
A few things I love: Small towns. Agricultural fairs. Froggy Bottom Guitars. Soaking in natural hot springs in the mountains of the west. Museums. Historic sites. Hiking and sleeping near mostly intact ecosystems, where bears, wolves and cougars and the buffalo still roam.