Playing with Wildfire
"The broad sweeping compassion of this polyvocal novel takes 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.
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--BOOKLIST, starred review
"Fierce, vivid, and closely observed, Playing with Wildfire is an exercise in paying attention. And if "attention is the most basic form of love," the earth is not the only thing in danger. Love is an endangered ecology too, and there is an inherent mutualism to what's required for healing."
--FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review
"Reading Pritchett's wise and attentive book, I entered into the heart(s) of a human and greater-than-human community that felt like my own."
--CAMILLE T. DUNGY, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
"In this gorgeous novel, we see the fire in everything it
touches: the deer, the house, the lungs, the heart. The form of Playing with
{Wild}Fire, like fire itself, mutates and shifts, offering up glimmers of
dreams and truth within the ruin."
--BETH PIATOTE, author of The Beadworkers: Stories
"Incendiary, evocative writing that crackles on the page.
Part love letter to the Front Range of Colorado, part environmental manifesto.
Pritchett paints a complete and tender picture of one small community's
reckoning with the worst wildfire in Colorado history. A must-read."
--MOLLY IMBER, Maria's Bookshop
"In Playing With Wildfire, Laura Pritchett writes with
characteristic intelligence and humor. Her worldview in these burning times is
a rare cocktail, passion and wisdom in equal parts, administered here with
refreshing innovation."
--RICK BASS, author of For a Little While
"For those of us who live in the West, wildfire is no longer
a distant threat but a regular companion. Playing with {Wild}Fire captures this
reality by embracing the whole of life in the Anthropocene--music, food, sex,
illness, hope, motherhood, addiction, work, and more--in stories as
breathtakingly true and tender as they are, yes, playful."
--ANA MARIA SPAGNA, author of Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and
(Maybe) a Massacre
"Celebrated nature writer Laura Pritchett takes the reader
on a journey that is at once singular and daring, intimate and illuminating,
through a collection of stories that explore the myriad ways in which a massive
wildfire affects a small Colorado mountain community. Playing with {Wild}Fire
is a must-read for all of us enduring unprecedented wildfires as well as anyone
who wants to experience the possibilities of brilliant storytelling."
--CMARIE FUHRMAN, author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems
"Inventive, sassy, urgent. Playing with {Wild}Fire is rich
with surprises of all kinds, from start to finish."
--ALYSON HAGY, author of Scribe: A Novel
"Playing with {Wild}Fire is a wise and imaginative
collection in which aspen trees sing warnings, moose and raven describe a
terrifying inferno, and Mother Earth sends urgent postcards to humanity.
Pritchett's expansive exploration of what community means in the face of
climate change fueled megafires includes a cast of endearing and original
characters who split apart and come together and find ways to keep living
joyfully."
--CLAIRE BOYLES, author of Site Fidelity
