Published in 2019
146 pages
Gretel Ehrlich is an award-winning writer and naturalist. Born and raised in California, she was educated at Bennington College and UCLA Film School. She is the author of thirteen books, including the essay collection The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), the novel Heart Mountain (1988), and the memoirs A Match to the Heart: One Woman’s Story of Being Struck by Lightning (1994) and This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland (2001), as well as The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold (2004), and, most recently, Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of a Tsunami (2014). Her prose pieces have appeared in Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic, among many other publications. Ehrlich lives in Montana and Hawaii.
What is this book about?
In 1976, Gretel Ehrlich travelled from her home in New York to Wyoming to shoot a film on sheep herders. While she was away, her partner died. Although she had never planned to stay, Ehrlich found herself unable to leave. What started out as a work trip became the beginning of a new life, as well as a long and deep attachment to place.
Writing of sheep herding alone across Wyoming badlands, her experience of being struck by lightning, the true meaning of cowboys, and taking her new husband to the rodeo for their honeymoon, as well as the changing seasons, extreme winters and the wind, Ehrlich draws us into her personal relationship with this ‘planet of Wyoming’ she has come to call home.
As tough as it is tender, The Solace of Open Spaces is travel memoir that is embedded in place, and nature writing with an unexpected bite. It is a bold testimony to how the landscape we live in affects who we are.
