Playing with Wildfire
By Laura Pritchett
Torrey House Press | 2024 | 250 pages
Based on the Cameron Peak fire that ravaged Colorado in the latter half of 2020, Playing with Wildfire bears witness to an ecosystem in extremity. Although the book’s focus is deadly serious—working at the intersection of climate change and COVID—Pritchett’s formal innovation creates the kinetic energy one associates with play, making the novel exploratory and lively, reminding us of the possible even as it gives voice to a world in pain. Within this formal innovation, the novel is rich in both individual characters and a sense of their interconnectedness, and I found myself not wanting to leave their community at the book’s close.
Playing with Wildfire begins with Gretel, who is exhausted from the aftermath of contracting COVID, the deer eating her lilacs, and the wildfire smoke covering her town. Gretel becomes a touchstone of sorts throughout the novel. Her community, indeed her home, is at the edge of the fire evacuation line, which situates us in a liminal space. This is a space of danger, but also a place of possibility. After trying unsuccessfully to pretend the smoky sky is “foggy Ireland or Christmas,” Gretel addresses her own malaise by opening her place to others:
So she went outside and spray-painted a sign: FREE SHOWERS AND FOOD. PLACES TO PITCH A TENT. ALL WELCOME. She had a responsibility, after all: she was the first house at the base of the canyon and the simple fact of her location made her useful to others.
The nearness to the evacuation zone means Gretel encounters a range of figures fleeing the burning mountain—both human and animal—and arguably all the characters in the novel are on the border of needing to ask for or offer help.
It would be wrong, though, to suggest we get to know the other members of this complex community through Gretel’s lens. Instead, the novel travels through voice after voice, form after form. Some chapters employ traditional narrative structures, but others vary widely, including a chapter written as a frustrated grant application, and one presented as an excerpt from a dystopian play written by a highschooler to her beloved. Other chapters provide visuals: a diner-napkin map, graffiti on an abandoned milk truck. Here, too, are lyrical forays into tree and animal consciousness. The formal variety calls to mind Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, but shifted towards an eco-consciousness. (Barbara Kingsolver is the other writer who most came to mind, though I should emphasize the voice here is wholly its own.) Importantly, most chapters are grounded by the unique sensibility of a specific character, making them not only inventive but intimate. The formal shifts underscore one of the arguments of the book. As the grant-application chapter wryly announces: “Alert: There are other ways of knowing.”
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book, though, is its deep sense of place. In her afterward, Pritchett writes, “Though I have traveled widely, I have always lived in this general location, and I have always wished to be a fierce see-er of this one spot of Planet Earth,” adding “by closely observing the external, we can access the most honest internal landscapes of the human experience.” Or, as one of her narrators observes, “attention is the most basic form of love.” This consciousness, this depth of knowing and loving a place and its plants and animals, people and mountains, is palpable in the book.
The internal landscapes are just as richly drawn, showing how the extremes of the external world create a series of interior reactions. This collision leads one otherwise law-abiding woman on a spray-painting spree and another to dig up an 18th-century corpse for a heart-to-heart. One smokejumper is moved to propose to another. In richly detailed scenes, we see people unsure of their own capabilities performing small but heroic acts—Bob doesn’t want to, but then finally drives his trailer up the burning mountain to load as many of his neighbor’s cattle onto it as he can before the fire comes.
While there’s much that is dire for these characters, Pritchett tempers this with levity, lust, and delight. When the mountain speaks, it’s with a voice that can say, “Yessssireeee, I do appreciate boinking out of the crust of this blue spinning ball at this particular blink in time, whoo-eee, it’s a miracle, indeed.” And as young Alexis sums up, more than a few of the characters fall in/out of love during the catastrophe: “I learned that Gretel is in love with Norman (yay) and Paige kissed Sherm (ick) and the teenagers broke up (sad). So: love starts and then it stops. I’ll remember that.”
If there’s hope here, it’s that the possibility of connection persists—between the land and its inhabitants, among the people in a community—and in the possibility that we might yet fully pay attention to each other and the places with which we’re woven. Finally brought to her knees by it all, literally skinning them on the pavement as she walks to a neighbor’s house, Gretel pauses to first comfort herself, then to turn to the landscape for the promise of change:
She leaned forward and kissed her knee, as if it were some child separate from her. Then sat back, considered the whole valley. Her community. The rise of the foothill covered with mountain mahogany and their corkscrew seeds catching the sun. The yellow rabbit brush. And so, so many yellow grasses, grasses that were old and tired and leaning into winter. The enormous cottonwoods along the ditch bank, yellow and half-bare now. The season was on the cusp of changing.
I confess I am one of those people on the East Coast who the novel sometimes references, a person aware of wildfires in Colorado or California or Canada largely in the abstract. But like the smoke traveling hundreds of miles from these fires, the connections Pritchett makes in her novel made me experience her landscape in more visceral ways. Through richly drawn characters and lively forms, Playing with Wildfire invites us to be more attuned to the experiences of seemingly distant communities and, equally, to the ones we call home.
Laura Donnelly is the author of two collections of poetry, Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press) and Watershed (Cider Press Review). Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, SWWIM, EcoTheo Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York where she teaches poetry and nature writing at SUNY Oswego.
Header image of forest fire by Chil Vera, courtesy Pixabay.
