Playing With (Wild) Fire
Torrey House, February 2024
Evacuation orders are coming. A wildfire is bearing down. Playing With {Wild} Fire recounts the trauma and communal moments of a mountain town’s inhabitants as a wildfire roars their way.
Playing with experimental form in order to subvert storytelling expectations, told in polyphonic voices to inspire inclusion, and with a storyline which causes forced companionship in ways that disrupt our bifurcated country, this book plays with expectations on every level. Above all, it shows us that demolition might actually an opportunity for renovation for the ways we choose to live on planet Earth.
When a wildfire bears down on a mountain community, residents are forced to gather—resulting in a sudden tangle of love and lust, friendships that form across political divides, and a new hope for rethinking the ways we inhabit the burning planet.
Throughout these linked stories, we encounter a world as jarring and mesmerizing as fire itself—a literary landscape of experimental forms: 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 injured bear. Like one domino falling into another, each story reveals another piece of an intricate puzzle.
Playing with technique and disrupting expectation, this powerful collection captures how fire affects psyches and lives. And it shows how, sometimes, demolition can lead to renovation.
Pritchett, who lived on the edge of Colorado’s largest wildfire, has become one of the West’s major voices on environmental issues. Author of five novels, her books have received the PEN USA Award, the High Plains Book Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the Willa, and several Colorado Book Awards. She is the Director of the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and a regular columnist and contributor to major publications in the West.
Pritchett now brings us a collection of experimental work that will light the literary landscape on fire.
Starred Reviews
From Booklist
Who would view the confluence of COVID-19 and Colorado’s wildfires as a good thing? Virtuoso novelist and nature writer Pritchett (The Blue Hour, 2017) contemplates these dual disasters from the perspectives of a disparate group of characters whose experiences force them to process some soul-searching evaluations. Of varying ages and backgrounds, political viewpoints and economic wherewithal, the people (and owls and bears, even trees) who call Sleeping Bear Mountain home appreciate their surroundings and acknowledge the threats in equally diverse ways. When evacuations force everyone and everything from their homes, be it A-frame or cave, tree branch or horse ranch, the loss of habitat is felt by humans at an almost animal level and vice versa. In Pritchett’s empathic telling, we feel for Mama Home Bear and White Owl as viscerally as we do for Gretl and Sherm. Pritchett’s creativity is boundless as she bends formats and blends voices in this vibrant paean to nature’s fragility. “How shivering beautiful that we all watch one another in this blink of time, the mountain mumbled.” At levels both micro and macro, Pritchett brings an electric connectivity to her portrait of the precariousness of this one wild, threatened world.
— Carol Haggas
From Foreward
Laura Pritchett’s Playing with Wildfire is a rare climate novel of now. It begins in late August, as a megafire started by a visiting hiker sweeps through Colorado along with COVID-19. Prose, poetry, plays, government grant applications, astrological natal charts, obituaries, graffiti, and maps distill the impossible weight of a rural community and planet in distress into a plea to “think of all who have loved this place” and demand radical, restorative action.
A work of great heart and imagination, the novel utilizes multiple forms and perspectives to construct its narrative. As one character states, winking at the meta: “like the pandemic, these megafires present a new type of suffering—both for land and human. The suffering feels like experimentation. Requires new stories told in unique forms and techniques.” There’s also tenacious attention paid to the warts-and-all truth of rural Colorado, preventing abstractions.
The book’s protagonists range from various wild animals escaping the fire to the mountains the fire ravaged; they include emergency services personnel and locals too. All struggle to process the grief and rage of knowing—that these tragedies were predicted and predictable; that their present crises cannot be undone; that proximity, or the lack thereof, is a crucial ingredient for action and empathy; and that their community’s geographical and emotional distance from decision makers, pundits, and lobbyists means no one is likely to listen to their plea that “the planet is burning. We need to get the fires out. Then we can discuss other stuff.”
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.
— Letitia Mongomery-Rodgers
What others are saying:
In Playing with {Wild}Fire, 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 The Traveling Feast
The broad sweeping compassion of this polyvocal novel takes my breath away. When communities experience devastation like the wildfire at the center of Laura Pritchett's newest novel, everyone experiences the same events, but in their own ways. These many modes of seeing and understanding are the realities from which we weave the story of the world. Reading Prtichett'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
It is time to find new ways to talk about wildfire. It is time to re-story and restore our relationship with fire. In Playing with {wild}fire, celebrated nature writer Laura Pritchett does both. 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 {wildfire}, a book that will be lauded as much for its experimental forms as for its superb writing, 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, editor of Native Voices and Cascadia
Inventive, sassy, urgent. In times when we need a different approach to so much, this novel is rich with surprises of all kinds, from start to finish.
— Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe
Playing with Wildfire 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—which is, of course, the challenge we all face.
— Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity
In this gorgeous pyrobiographic novel, we see the fire in everything it touches: the deer, the house, the lungs, the heart. The form of this novel, like fire itself, mutates and shifts as it moves through, offering up glimmers of dreams and truth within the ruin. In this generative work on the ravages of climate change, Laura Pritchett gives us what we most urgently need: a way to stay with it.
— Beth Piatote, author of The Beadworkers: Stories
For those of us who live in the West, wildfire is no longer a distant threat but a regular companion. This novel, more than any I’ve read, captures this reality because here, as in all her work, Laura Pritchett embraces 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