Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children
Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children explores in the microcosm of a forty-acre high mountain meadow and its surrounding lands vast worlds of ecological and familial migrations. The announcement by her eighty-five-year-old mother that she would be moving to Colorado to live out her last years sparks Winograd into a journey into what it means to be a steward of a land and its inhabitants she knows little about and steward of a grieving mother sliding irrevocably into the blindness she fears and the dying for which she longs.
Expanded gold mines, drought-induced wildfires, sudden aspen decline, solitary hawks and summer-pastured longhorns, coyote and elusive cougar, fairy trumpets: as Winograd takes her mother on an exploration of the inhabitants of this deceptively remote and arid landscape in southwest Colorado at the "back" of Pikes Peak, she begins to discover its metaphorical connections to the emotional family landscape she now lives in.
In this collection of essays, Winograd braids together the pressing environmental issues of today with the sacred and profane intersections of the human and the natural world .
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"A beautifully crafted, eclectic collection. Part philosophical speculation, part mythology, part family history, part environmental and social critique, these braided lyric essays on place pulse with felt life. Winograd offers us reflective meditations on such natural phenomena as physical beauty, migration, gravitational waves, and fossils, in addition to explorations of larger, universal matters--illness, death, and mortality."
--Michael Steinberg, Founding Editor, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
"Slow Arrow excavates gossamer from granite. Butterflies that spend the last stage of their brief lives mimicking the beauty of the earth, leaves fossilized in stone--in this beautiful and evocative book about a dying mother, dying animals, and a stricken, dying planet, all of us are frail children following, inexorably, the slow arrow of time."
--Steven Harvey, author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder.
"Slow Arrow blends narratives of family, region, and culture in simultaneously lyrical and observant ways. We are present at the most intimate and immediate openings of the author's synapses, inhabiting memory, emotion, and insight as it happens for her. A phenomenal achievement, powerful and haunting."
--Robert Root, author of Happenstance and Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place and editor of Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place
"These essays interweave an oft-rhapsodic syntax with a deft commingling of disparate subjects; lingering on the contrastive solitudes of a Rocky Mountain cabin at 9600 feet and a Denver suburb haunted by family tragedies; shifting between moods playful, literate, and grave so facilely that their consequent structures seem almost improvised. Such daring incitement of the form few writers even attempt. This book places Winograd among America's finest essayists."
--Tom Larson, author of Spirituality and the Writer.
"In the best kind of lyrical wandering, these linked essays grow out of a place--beloved, disappointing, challenging, and richly inhabited by both creatures and memory. Winograd's pondering ranges across questions of migration, habitat destruction, responsibility, the will to exist, and the spiritual life of a nonspiritual person. Slow Arrow takes its time, and, in heartbreakingly beautiful prose, forces us to slow down. Impressionist pieces of personal story and natural history accumulate and excavate an emotional landscape from within the physical one, compelling us onward through the sheer pleasure of seeing how she keeps all the story threads in line."
--Laura Julier, editor, Fourth Genre
