Review
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Title: Playing with Wildfire
Author: Laura Pritchett
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Genre: Fiction
Year Published: 2024
Number of Pages: 250
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-948814-89-8
Price: $18.95
Reviewed by Adam McLain for the Association of Mormon Letters
A fire burns across the mountains of Colorado. Started because of the stupidity of a single human being, this fire’s influence stretches over many lives, affecting them through its constant and consistent burn. But as ash falls from the sky, clogging lungs, the coronavirus silently stretches its deadly fingers to embrace those displaced by burn and ember. On the mountain, off the mountain, through exhaustion, coughing, solitude, annoyance, love, Laura Pritchett’s Playing with Wildfire captures vignettes of lives lived in the broad swatch of nature displaced by a raging fire. Partly based on the recurring wildfires that cross the Rocky Mountains and other wilderness areas of the United States, brought on and increased in intensity due to climate change, Playing with Wildfire gets at the lives of the affected and displaced—human and non-human—showing all those who read it the devastation of human-caused climate change, not just to property and livelihood but also to lives as well. Told through an anthology of stories, each chapter takes up a new character, introducing the reader to a broad, inclusive swatch of people surviving in the shadow of the raging inferno. The book is a magnificent tour de force that reckons with a wild blaze and an untamed virus.
The twin catastrophic forces in the book—fire and COVID—play out in almost every chapter. Pritchett faces these catastrophes with characters who are tired, apathetic, angry, exhausted—in short, characters who represent all of us because I would think many of us are also tired, apatetic, angry, and exhausted with the various natural disasters and communal pandemics we’ve faced over the last few years. In “Play, hands,” for example, Pritchett’s character Lou, whose chapter is told in fifteen short paragraphs, tells the reader that “We humans want all sorts of things to go like that,” referring to a simple desire to learn the guitar. Still, in the next section, “then COVID and wildfires came” (158). Each story exists beneath these two events—events that every reader is familiar with. In “True line of latitude,” Nate and Nastassja discuss why their relationship is ending, and Nate states, “I’m tired,” to which Nastassja demands him to tell her why he’s tired. Nate grumbles, “I dunno! Wildfire! COVID! Climate change! It all presses down and things just…dissipate” (54). This frustration is what Pritchett is tapping into and summoning in her writing: there’s a lot of crap happening in the world, and it’s a lot for anyone—all of us—to shoulder. And Pritchett, through her character Ann, reveals a dark truth of what we all think at one time or another: “I should care, shouldn’t I? . . . I’m having a hard time caring about anything these days. Something’s wrong with humanity” (35).
When writing about the current environmental crisis, nature writing, at its best, does what Pritchett is doing in Playing with Wildfire: presents the finitude of humanity and struggles with that finitude and power that resides in every human being. Within the cracks of that presentation—or perhaps through its dissipation—Pritchett provides glimmers of hope: moments of love, of care, of living. But the point is not to give the reader a good feeling about our future: the future does not look great, and we are in for many, many, many, many more climate catastrophes, disproportionately affecting large groups of human beings. What is one to do when the light of the wildfire reflects off your face? How does one respond when the fire eats your backyard, your house, your farm, your cattle? The answers to these questions are multitudinous, and there is no one-size-fits-all. This is why we are all tired and why we will continue to be tired. But, Playing with Wildfire, in an appropriate respond to the moment, presents a large, diverse swath of responses.
Because I am reviewing this for the Association of Mormon Letters, I must attest that I’m not sure this quite fits into the framing of Latter-day Saint literature as by, for, or about Mormons. Through a tepid Google search, I could not find out if Pritchett is or once was a Latter-day Saint. I admit I did not search far and wide, since I don’t necessarily believe an author needs to be a member of the community to be read by the community or through the community’s theoretical reading lens, but from what I could tell, her connection to Mormonism comes through neighborly relations (please correct me in the comments if I am wrong!). As far as I could tell, there are no overtly Latter-day Saint characters in the text. One could read the book to find various Latter-day Saint principles, from caring for others to sustainably caretaking the planet. If we are to take Mormon literature as a subset of the American West literary field, then Pritchett’s book, centered in Colorado, fits the larger generic conversation in which Mormon literature finds itself nestled more often than not.
That being said, I do not want to say Latter-day Saints should only read things by, for, and about Mormons. Quite the contrary, more reading outside the circle of wagons strengthens those on the inside than anything else. Playing with Wildfire is an excellent place to begin or continue this communal and cultural engagement because Pritchett’s book engages in so many other trends and generic conventions within contemporary American literature. Pritchett’s novel is nature writing at its best—human and non-human characters dealing with the challenges brought by a human-caused climate crisis. Within nature writing, she experiments with form, narrative, and genre, telling the story through not only first-, second-, and third-person points of view but also through a grant application, a map sketched on a napkin, and a play. The book is activist, protest writing, defiantly calling on all humanity to recognize that we are complicit in the catastrophes occurring and those to come (also noting that some of us are more to blame than others). Pritchett dabbles in various genres that have grown in popularity recently: moments of autofiction pop up in the text; anthology storytelling becomes an excellent approach to inclusivity and diversity; and the nature writing, as I mentioned, is in the vein of Terry Tempest Williams. The book is informed beautifully by environmental and activists scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Women, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Milkweed, 2013) is invoked within the novel and inspires much of the writing. And all of these literary techniques are wrapped up in a book that makes it exciting to turn each page, meet new characters, and be swept along with how they are dealing with a changing climate.
Playing with Wildfire may not be by, for, or about Mormons, but it should be read by Latter-day Saints, whose doctrine implores them to care for the environment around them. Pritchett’s book awakens us to our own sense of care, inviting us to see the world around us for its beautiful diversity and work to combat climate catastrophe.