The wildfires and shared trauma of 2020 inspired Colorado author Laura Pritchett’s new novel

The summer of 2020 is synonymous with the COVID-19 pandemic, but in Colorado it has another ignominious distinction: the year of Colorado’s three largest wildfires.

That year, the Pine Gulch Fire in western Colorado, the East Troublesome Fire near Grand Lake, and the Cameron Peak Fire burned more than half a million acres. Laura Pritchett, author and director of the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University, lives near where the Cameron Peak Fire burned in Larimer County.

“I live right next to what was the perimeter (of the Cameron Peak fire) and outside my living room window I could see all the trailers coming down the mountain, people rushing with their animals and their belongings , and when I’m stressed, I write. It’s a form of therapy. But I also hope to share the story of the trauma we have all experienced in part to let others outside of this region know what we are going through,” Pritchett said. “It was such a terrible summer.”

This writing produced “Playing with Wildfire,” which examines a fictional fire based on the destruction of Cameron Peak. The novel shifts between perspectives and examines how a community responds to a natural disaster and what that means for its relationship with the natural world.

Here are four takeaways from Pritchett’s conversation with Colorado Matters about his latest book.

Have readers of this novel shared with you their own memories of devastating fires?

Pritchett: They did, and that makes me really happy because the ultimate goal of books, I think, is to connect us and allow us to share stories. And I shared mine through this book, but I love hearing other people’s stories. And above all, I was contacted by people who had lost their cabin in the canyon not far from my home, and they were just able to talk about their grief at seeing their grandmother’s things burn, for example, and just to feel seen. and that I’ve done a good job of expressing stress and cortisol and anxiety and fear and that has made them sort of curable, which is really nice to hear because a lot of people are like, “Oh, it’s just too close to home. . I can’t read it. It’s too recent. But I feel like for some people who are in the right place, it’s actually the opposite of this reading. It helps you process what you just experienced and grieve, which I think we need to do so that emotions don’t get buried and ignored.

Why is it important to examine some of these shared traumas like that of summer 2020?

I firmly believe that what you don’t talk about doesn’t get fixed, and that’s one of the reasons why, for example, I love running this MFA in Nature Writing (program). I think people want to talk about what’s happening to planet Earth so they can do something about it. And if we don’t talk about COVID and wildfires and climate change and if we can’t overcome political differences and find common ground again, we won’t get there. So I think it’s really important to re-engage in difficult times in order to move past them and move on to something brighter and better.

About COVID-19. What are novelists supposed to do to know whether to include this in their work?

Pritchett: I actually have a book coming out this summer where I was asked to remove all the COVID stuff (because) it dated it. The editor argued that readers don’t really want to remember that time, so it’s so funny. But in this novel, “Playing with Wildfire,” COVID is a big part of the plot because it was 2020. We were going through wildfires and COVID and they both seemed so random and so dangerous, and so I felt like it just had to be. Be there. In the meantime, I’ve started exploring books set during the pandemic, and there are quite a few coming out now, “The Sentence” by Louise Erdrich, for example, and “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett . I’m really interested in seeing more COVID books. The publishing world may not want them, but I think it’s important to have them in our cultural conversation. So it’s an interesting dynamic that’s happening in this world right now.

“Playing with Wildfire” is written from many different perspectives, including animals. For what?

Pritchett: I’ve been very interested in books that address the non-human. We love our human stories and the vast majority of the book is certainly told by human characters, children, teenagers, old people and middle-aged people. So I’m very interested in human stories, but lately I think we’ve seen in our fiction that’s coming out around the world today that more and more attention is being paid to non-human voices, and that’s intriguing. I really feel like it’s time to start giving voice to creatures beyond our own.