Amy Irvine – författare

"A grief–stricken, heart–hopeful, soul song to the American Desert."—PAM HOUSTON, author of Deep CreekAs Ed Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness turns fifty, its iconic author, who has inspired generations of rebel–rousing advocacy on behalf of the American West, is due for a tribute as well as a talking to. In Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, Amy Irvine admires the man who influenced her life and work while challenging all that is dated—offensive, even—between the covers of Abbey''s environmental classic. Irvine names and questions the "lone male" narrative—white and privileged as it is—that still has its boots planted firmly at the center of today''s wilderness movement, even as she celebrates the lens through which Abbey taught so many to love the wild remains of the nation. From Abbey’s quiet notion of solitude to Irvine’s roaring cabal, the desert just got hotter, and its defenders more nuanced and numerous.AMY IRVINE is a sixth–generation Utahn and longtime public lands activist. Her work has been published in Orion, Pacific Standard, High Desert Journal, Climbing, Triquarterly, and other publications. Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and Colorado Book Award. Her essay "Spectral Light," which appeared in Orion and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, was a finalist for the Pen Award in Journalism, and her recent essay, “Conflagrations: Motherhood, Madness and a Planet on Fire” appeared among the 2017 Best American Essays'' list of Notables. Irvine teaches in the Mountainview Low–Residency MFA Program of Southern New Hampshire University—in the White Mountains of New England. She lives and writes off the grid in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.

“Full throttle, full immersion, full honesty, all surrender.”—LESLIE JAMISON, AUTHOR OF THE EMPATHY EXAMS“A starting place for healing our upended selves, families, culture, world.”—CRAIG CHILDS, AUTHOR OF THE ANIMAL DIALOGUESA ferocious, incandescent memoir about motherhood, liberation, and the natural world—following one woman’s journey to reclaim her wildest self.A descendant of Utah’s earliest Mormon inhabitants, Amy Irvine spent her young adulthood rebelling against the patriarchy that was her inheritance. She sought adventure outdoors, climbing granite walls, skiing backcountry powder, and fighting wildfires. She tested every limit imposed on her. But after the birth of her daughter, Irvine found herself in a situation uncannily similar to those of her pioneer forebears: isolated on a remote Colorado mesa, with a husband who was often gone, a child who was frequently and mysteriously ill, and a once remarkable life that was growing smaller and smaller.After a case of postpartum depression so intense it resembled zoochosis, the madness of a trapped animal, Irvine began the process of coming back to the world and unearthing a deeper connection with her child. Over the years that followed, encounters with animals—wild and domestic, predator and prey—led her forward, from a horseback showdown with a mountain lion to a more intimate run-in with the misunderstood black widow. And searching for guidance, she looked to the women who came before her: the tough, complicated ancestors whose lives, Irvine learned, are a testament to the freedom, loneliness, and mythmaking of the American West.Gloriously written and fiercely felt, Almost Animal places Amy Irvine among our greatest writers on the bonds between the human and natural worlds—including Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and Wendell Berry—as well as contemporary chroniclers of the American West, from Cheryl Strayed to Tara Westover.