About
Publisher’s Weekly called Stacy Carlson’s debut 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, 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.
Stacy grew up in Seattle, lived for many years in Oakland, CA, and now calls Minneapolis home. In addition to writing fiction, her daily life includes maintaining an editorial freelance practice and serving as education program manager for the Women’s Environmental Institute.
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 in Alaska. During the trip I would leave my tent in the middle of the night to bask in the midnight sun. Once, from the ridge behind camp, I witnessed a wolf moving through the landscape. I watched it cross the tundra plain, splash across a braid in the river and raid gull nests on a gravel bar. It dodged attacking birds, ate eggs, swam across a deeper channel, and continued on into the vast distance. 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 vitality, imaginations and our collective ecological health.”
Learn more about Stacy here.
Listen to an interview with Stacy about Among the Wonderful on KRCB radio (interview starts at 21:28).
