Gretel Erlich's The Solace of Open Spaces for March 2013

PVNWG members meet at a member's home on March 24 to discuss our impressions of Gretel Erlich's The Solace of Open Spaces. 

Born in 1946 in Santa Barbara, California, Erlich began to write full time in 1978 while living on a Wyoming Ranch, after the death of a loved one. In 1985, she drew immediate acclaim with The Solace of Open Spaces, a collection of essays.

From the publisher: Writing of hermits, cowboys, changing seasons, and the wind, Ehrlich draws us into her personal relationship with this "planet of Wyoming" she has come to call home. She captures the incredible beauty and the demanding harshness of natural forces in these remote reaches of the West, and the depth, tenderness and humor of the quirky souls who live there. Ehrlich, a former filmmaker and urbanite, presents in these essays a fresh and vibrant tribute to the new life she has chosen.

 

"Ehrlich's best prose belongs in a league with Annie Dillard and even Thoreau. The Solace of Open Spaces releases the bracing air of the wilderness into the stuffy, heated confines of winter in civilization." San Francisco Chronicle

 

Click here to read an interview with the author about her 2001 work Cold Heaven.

 

Click here for biography of the author.

 

Selected Works:

 

To Touch the Water, 1981,

The Solace of Open Spaces,  1985

Heart Mountain,  1988,

Drinking Dry Clouds: Stories from Wyoming, 1991

Islands, the Universe, Home, Viking Press, 1991

Arctic Heart: A Poem Cycle, Capra Press, 1992

A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning, 1994

John Muir: Nature's Visionary,National Geographic Society, 2000

This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland,  2001

The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold,  2004

In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, National Geographic Society, 2010

Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami, 2013