Santa Fe artist and writer Beth Surdut has always lived by water — Hawaii, New England and Florida — and at first, Santa Fe didn't seem appealing.

"It doesn't have an ocean," Surdut explained. But then she visited and "was completely interested and enchanted."

The landscape and the ever-present ravens fascinated her the most, leading to her move here and the creation of a visual storytelling project called Listening to Ravens, which includes drawings, each of which is accompanied by a myth or story.

Surdut is looking for Santa Feans who have raven stories to share with her that will be included in her new project.

"I call it story-catching," Surdut said about giving people an opportunity to tell their stories.

All of Surdut's drawings, along with their corresponding stories, can be found on her Web site, www.bethsurdut.com.

Listening to ravens

Surdut is not a mystical, New Age type of person, but the ravens did tell her to move here — in their own way.

"I found myself being very attracted to the ravens," she explained. "Some of the ravens I saw, I swear, were as big as turkeys, and I was able to get quite close to them."

Surdut went home to Florida with inspiration to do a project centered on ravens — and to pack her bags for Santa Fe.

"New Mexico is not some place to just visit," Surdut said. "For me, my feeling was I needed to come here, be here and live here. For me what works as a creative person, as both an artist and a writer, is being someplace, breathing it in and seeing what happens when I breathe out."

Until the moment came for her to move, she began "to get to know the bird through drawing" and a most peculiar thing happened.

"When I started drawing them, a raven came to see me every, single day," Surdut explained. "He would come and he would stand on the turquoise blue railing that went up to the porch. If he couldn't find me on the front porch than he would go to the corrugated tin roof in the back and make noise and dance on it until I came out.

"These weren't particularly long visits — it's that I came to expect that sometime during the day this bird would show up."

She took it as a sign that the raven was telling her to move to Santa Fe.

Catching stories

Surdut put her journalistic skills to use and began researching the science, stories and myths about ravens for Listening to Ravens. She used to mainly write feature stories about people and came to see her drawings as features of these ravens.

"When I started doing the drawings, I realized that the story would come," Surdut said. In her research, she found several inspirational stories and myths about ravens — such as that of the raven using trickery to steal things that humans didn't have.

"There is this beautiful story," Surdut said. "Raven was courting Grey Eagle's daughter and in order to court her, he transformed himself into a beautiful white raven."

The raven then realized Grey Eagle had the moon, stars, water and fire hanging in pouches, so he stole them. As he was taking the pouches back to Earth, smoke from the fire pouch changed the color of his feathers. "That's why he's the color he is now," Surdut explained.

She started telling people about her research and soon the stories started pouring in from all over. There was the story of a woman and her dog who used to watch ravens together. A friend of the woman's purchased one of Surdut's ravens to give as a gift.

"The day after her dog died, there was a raven feather at the stoop and she believed it was a message from her dog," Surdut said. "She said, 'I'm going to take the feature and frame it in a shadowbox with your drawing.' That really touched me."

She began writing those stories people were bringing to her "really proudly like a kitty who comes and drops a mouse at my feet," Surdut said.

She's been communicating with a Gallup woman who told her a story about her late son. As a kid growing up in Gallup, he had his eye on a particular house. He graduated from high school, went off to college and came back home to buy his house.

"He had a wonderful aesthetic sense and a love of birds — ravens in particular," Surdut explained. The man carved out big rocks to make watering troughs for the ravens.

"He died at the age of 35," Surdut said. After his death, "Raven feathers started showing up at (his mother's) house and she and her husband thought they were messages from her son."

A man in Alaska shared a story about ravens that visited him for 16 years.

Some of the ravens "would park their fledglings in the back of his pickup truck so he could baby-sit," Surdut said with a laugh. She's planning a special drawing for this story.

Surdut wants to catch more of these stories from her neighbors in Santa Fe, which will help her get to know them.

"When somebody tells you what I like to call a critter tale, you learn more about the person telling the story more than the critter they're talking about," Surdut said.

She'll welcome both written and oral tales. E-mail her at info@bethsurdut.com or call 978-793-1062.

"I came here to do this raven series and to connect with other people about it," Surdut said. "I think that this is the beginning of a long and delightful journey."

Contact Ana Maria Trujillo at 986-3084 or atrujillo@sfnewmexican.com.