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Overview
Caroline Marwitz is an assistant professor at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. She lives in Denver with her husband, Curt Marwitz, and three sons, Adam, Ben, and Alex. Caroline earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona after completing her BA in English from Colorado State University. She's taught writing for ten years, and has written numerous essays for a number of magazines and weekly newspapers including High Country News and The Fence Post. Caroline also had three short stories and a number of poems published and was editor-in-chief eighteen years ago of a weekly newspaper, The Laramie Chronicle, where Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship is based. Caroline is currently finishing her second novel, Where I've Lived and What I've Lived For, and is beginning work on a second book of non-fiction.Synopsis
Naming The Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeshipis a book of non-fiction essays arranged around the seasons of the southern Wyoming high plains. It tells the story of an elderly woman I knew as a child, growing up at the edge of Laramie, Wyoming, in the 1970's. She was strong-willed and fiercely independent, with a love for the wind-scoured plains around Laramie matched only by her great knowledge of this rough environment. The book details my "apprenticeship" with her as I learned about the natural history of a place whose harsh beauty is not often appreciated. The book weaves stories of the past with seasonal images of the present, as twenty-five years later, I return to Laramie, now a mother of three, and search for my favorite place on the high plains northeast of town. Development, even in this small town, has overrun the vast "prairie" I once roamed with my dog. What I discover is not what I had sought. I hope that readers will be captured by the story of the elderly woman and the shy young girl and the tough yet fragile land that both of them love.
Bloomsbury Review
"...an unforgettable story that is part memoir and part prose poem, a story that is brilliantly crafted with strands of etymology, geology, botany, local history, and a naturalist's close-eyed observation... [Marwitz] glides from present occurrences to past recollections with exacting ease, taking the reader smoothly back and forth in time, riding the edge of transitions with the grace of a figure skater. In language stuffed with imagery and trussed together with startling similes, Marwitz writes naturally and beautifully, with just enough matter-of-factness to make the reader feel comfortable and at home in a well-loved and vibrantly remembered place. "