This week on The Write Question, Sarah Capdeville discusses Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost: Essays on Solitude and Landscape (University of Mexico Press), winner of the 2022 River Teeth Literary Non-Fiction Book Prize and an incredibly lyric collection of essays that cohere into a tender whole, giving readers (and here, listeners) a look into Sarah’s experiences in nature, with chronic pain, within queer communities, and within and outside of her solitude(s).
About the book:
Rooted in Western Montana, the essays of Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost navigate how sense of place intertwines with sense of self, filling geographical and personal in-betweens of identity and illness, memory and story, and intimacy and solitude. This stunning and evocative debut gives shape to those distances, naming them as grief, narrative, and belonging. Capdeville begins the collection with one of many fissures of health, setting the stage for a lush braiding of metaphor, the body, and the natural world. In spanning the space between loss and being lost, Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost outlines absence, the evolution of self, and Capdeville’s foundation of place in trail work, travel, and early adulthood. Readers will find themselves enmeshed in Capdeville’s reflections on how the seen and unseen interconnect to shape an inner world.
About Sarah:
Sarah Capdeville is a non-fiction editor for The Hopper and The Changing Times. She lives in Missoula, Montana, where she takes many slow hikes and daydreams about the crosscut saw.
Sarah Capdeville recommends:
Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong (Vintage Books)
Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir by Walela Nehanda (Kokila)
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (Scribner)
Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw by Ana Maria Spagna (Oregon State University Press)
This Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong (Penguin Random House)
Lauren Korn recommends:
Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost: Essays on Solitude and Landscape (University of Mexico Press)
Hush of the Land: A Lifetime in the Bob Marshall Wilderness (Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press)
Borealis: An Essay by Aisha Sabatini Sloan (Coffee House Press)
Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Vintage Books), Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Vintage Books), and Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Picador USA) by Terry Tempest Williams
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The Write Question team for this episode was Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Chris Moyles, co-producer, editor, and sound engineer. This episode is supported by Fact & Fiction, an independent bookstore located in the heart of downtown Missoula, Montana, providing books for all ages and supporting the literary community in Montana and beyond. More information can be found at factandfictionbooks.com.
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Funding for The Write Question comes from Humanities Montana; members of Montana Public Radio; and from the Greater Montana Foundation—encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.
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