Bio

Publisher’s Weekly called Stacy Carlson’s novel, Among the Wonderful, “Intelligent, engrossing, and utterly unique.” Her essays and fiction have appeared in Tin House, Post Road, Inkwell, Sparkle+Blink, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from The Mesa Refuge, The Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, The Arctic Circle, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Signal Fire. She received the Dana Portfolio Award and was a contributing author for the collection In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing. Stacy holds an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in English Literature with honors from Wesleyan University.

Stacy grew up in Seattle, lived for many years in Oakland, CA, and now calls Minneapolis home. In addition to her fiction practice, her daily life includes delivering wetlands-focused outdoor education and maintaining a robust writing and editing freelance practice.

Her background also includes work as a historical ecologist, fish cannery worker, hot springs caretaker, field crew on a bird refuge in SE Alaska, and hiking guide in Big Sur. She was only 23 miles away from Mt. St. Helens when it erupted in 1980, and she credits that experience as the reason she became a writer.

Stacy’s creative writing is deeply concerned with wild nature:

“I once spent time on the Canning River, north of the Brooks Range of Alaska. During the trip I would leave my tent in the middle of the night to see what I could see in the midnight sun. Once, from the ridge behind camp, I witnessed a wolf moving through the landscape. After crossing the tundra plain, it splashed across a braid of the river and raided some gull nests on a gravel bar. It dodged attacking gulls, ate some eggs, swam across another narrow riverbraid, and continued on its way. I have never shaken the feeling that this creature, free in its wild, ample territory, is one of the most important things I’ll see in my lifetime. This conviction drives my writing in that it catalyzed my belief that true wilderness is vital to the human psyche and feeds our mytho-poetic imaginations as well as our collective ecological health.”

Stacy created this film using pinhole photographs she took while in Svalbard participating in The Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency.

Learn more about Stacy here.

Listen to an interview with Stacy about her book on KRCB radio (interview starts at 21:28).

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