Here comes a long-anticipated book from a major voice in the American West.
"Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return" is an intimate and generous text, beautifully written in dense,rich prose, a paean of discovery and loss on the South Fork of Idaho's Salmon River. A growing Indigenous curiosity permeates these pages, that ancient view of seeing all nature as alive and kin. And there is tension: CMarie Fuhrman shows up in the wild sometimes as Crazy Horse, at other times, Columbus--seeking metaphor and story, tangled initially in fear that often dissolves in love. The richness of wild nature, dogs, family and community are all celebrated. This is a wonderful book.
-Doug Peacock, author of The Grizzly Years, Was it Worth It?, and Walking it Off
Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return
This is more than a personal narrative; it is a powerful call for environmental awareness, the feminine, understanding of history, and a celebration of beauty. With unflinching honesty, CMarie Fuhrman examines the complexities of history, the sacredness of the land, and the urgent need to protect our wild spaces. These essays resonate with a deep reverence for Indigenous people, history, and the natural world. They will speak to anyone who has found refuge in nature, wrestled with the past, or dared to envision a brighter tomorrow.
Praise for Salmon Weather
There is a line that lingers perhaps midway through Salmon Weather that stays with me, like the sublime terror that follows a rapid run earlier while reflecting at the evening campfire: “Her last heartbeat is still in my palm.” It is powerful in its moment of appearance, and I haven’t forgotten since reading it high over Turtle Island aboard a jet hurtling me east and away from everything familiar. I found CMarie Fuhrman’s fearless beating heart echoing through this profound collection of essays, its rhythm keeping me grounded to all the wild things and places near to my own, beautiful and dangerous and conflicted as they are, as I traveled, in a fashion I haven’t experienced in some time. What a companion to living this book is! Salmon Weather is a mighty and essential gift.
– Chris La Tray, Métis storyteller, author of Becoming Little Shell
When I wonder about the weight of inheritance – about what landscapes hold, the heft of history, the texture of identity, about what my role is to steward the present for the future – I turn to CMarie Fuhrman’s deft, muscular, and challenging writing. These essays are bedrock for who we’ve been and who we can become.
--Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
To read a new book by CMarie Fuhrman is to experience life-changing revelations: to see mountains and waters as full of vibrant, sentient creatures; to find intimacy in the interweavings of the braids of a river and the lines of a hand; to feel a fawn’s last heartbeat pulsing in a human palm; to hear how a land speaks through songs of coyotes and bugles of elk; to learn how poems and bodies can be maps to “restoration” and “restoryation” of wounded minds and scarred wilds; and to intuit, at last, the contours of a new “geography of hope.”
—Katie Ives, author of Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams
For each of the ruins that CMarie Fuhrman stunningly excavates in this gorgeous collection, she offers a formidable measure of intellect, heart, and grace. Here is a writer who refuses easy consolation and smug pontification toward the people and forces that rupture life, land, family, and culture. Here is a writer who can imagine herself the sort of survivor who both kills and cleans up, who is as open to taking responsibility as she is to pursuing transcendence. I’ve read Fuhrman’s essays online and in the paper for years. I am thrilled to finally be able to press her long-awaited collection into the hands of all the readers who will be transformed by it.
-Kate Lebo, Washington State Book Award Winner, author of Pie School, The Book of Difficult Fruit, and Seven Prayers.
Salmon Weather touches on matters about which I know a bit, snakes and deer hunting for example, and gets them right..these deeply moving essays amount to a shared journey, during which Fuhrman does something rare and precious—takes readers, regardless of our own immensely varied stories, onto perilous ground. Thanks to this Indigenous woman’s gifted prose, an old white guy like me can better grapple with identity, fear, and loss, with love for particular places, dogs, and people, with prospects for a hopeful future.
-Harry W. Greene, Cornell University emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, and author of Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art
Gorgeous, gut-wrenching, and transcendent. CMarie Fuhrman offers the reader both her arrant honesty and her giant heart. Salmon Weather casts a love spell.
--Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West and True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America.
Salmon Weather is a map to becoming, of finding oneself inside the arms of landscape, of loving and leaving and living and dying. It explores not only the deep wild of the Idaho backcountry, but the deeper wildness of the human heart. In essays both tender and unflinching, CMarie Fuhrman bears witness to stories and places, animals and people, and the profound paradoxes that have shaped her identity as an adopted Native person. In the end, this book is a love letter not only to place and a life deeply lived inside weather and seasons, but to life itself, in all its uncertainty, for all of us—to the person we were and the one we hope to become.
-Karen Auvinen, author of Rough Beauty: Four Seasons of Mountain Living
Co-edited with Elizabeth Bradfield & Derek Sheffield Cascadia Field Guide brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide. This unique book contains 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from Geoduck to Cassia Crossbill), offering any reader, local or visitor, a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place.
In this groundbreaking anthology of Indigenous poetry and prose, Native poems, stories, and essays are informed with a knowledge of both what has been lost and what is being restored. It presents a diverse collection of stories told by Indigenous writers about themselves, their histories, and their present; a celebration of culture and the possibilities of language, in conversation with those poets and storytellers who have paved the way. A truly synergetic collection of contemporary and early Native voices. Featuring forty-four poets, including Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, Sherwin Bitsui, Heid E. Erdrich, Layli Long Soldier, and Orlando White; original influence essays by Diane Glancy on Lorca, Chrystos on Audre Lorde, Louise Erdrich on Elizabeth Bishop, LeAnne Howe on W. D. Snodgrass, Allison Hedge Coke on Delmore Schwartz, Suzanne Rancourt on Ai, and M. L. Smoker on Richard Hugo, among others; and, a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists.
The poems in Fuhrman's book are a kind of siphoning of language which results in a fusion of earth, animal, human--a one-ness, beautiful, and also damned. As a poet who hikes and lives in a landscape still wild, she brings us the wild and the broken. The double meaning of the title shows the reader her intent--to both pierce and bond with her words. The first five poems describe both the beauty and mutilation of the beings of water--salmon. "Neither one of us had our second names..." Here is the linkage between the damming of the reservoir and the loss of land--home--death for the persona of the speaker, a native woman. The body of the world, of fish, and of women is shown through exquisite language and a blending of the senses: "her eyes straining to hear..." Then the tonal shift in "The Problem of My Body"--"scars of your scalpels and your slurs"--replicates the damn you implicated throughout these poems. Fuhrman has ordered her book in a spiral, a circling, a nurturing word and world we are meant to read.