Playing with Wildfire (Paperback)
"The broad sweeping compassion of this polyvocal novel takes
my breath away."
When a wildfire bears down on a mountain community,
residents are forced to gather for safety--resulting in a tangle of love and
lust that pulls people from their isolation, friendships that form across
political divides, and a new hope for rethinking the ways humans inhabit the
burning planet. Playing with Wildfire is a literary landscape
that is an experiment in form: an astrology report; a grant
application-turned-love-story; a phone call from Mother Earth; an obituary for
a wildfire; a burned mountain's conversation with a lone woman and an injured
bear. Every story captures how fire affects the human psyche and
life, and how destruction can lead to renewal.
my breath away."
--CAMILLE T. DUNGY, author of Soil: The Story of a
Black Mother's Garden
When a wildfire bears down on a mountain community,
residents are forced to gather for safety--resulting in a tangle of love and
lust that pulls people from their isolation, friendships that form across
political divides, and a new hope for rethinking the ways humans inhabit the
burning planet. Playing with Wildfire is a literary landscape
that is an experiment in form: an astrology report; a grant
application-turned-love-story; a phone call from Mother Earth; an obituary for
a wildfire; a burned mountain's conversation with a lone woman and an injured
bear. Every story captures how fire affects the human psyche and
life, and how destruction can lead to renewal.
Laura Pritchett is the author of five novels, two nonfiction books, and editor of three environmental anthologies, and her work has been the recipient of the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA, the High Plains Book Award, several Colorado Book Awards, and others. Her best-known novel, Stars Go Blue, has been optioned for TV rights. She's published over 300 essays and short stories in national venues, most recently in The Sun, Terrain, Camas, Orion, Creative Nonfiction, and others. She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and holds a PhD from Purdue University. When not writing or teaching, she can be found sauntering around the West, especially her home state of Colorado.