Gretel Ehrlich is the author of The Future of Ice, A Match to the Heart, Facing the Wave, and other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She studied at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She now divides her time between Montana and Hawaii.
We've often put Ehrlich in the category of "nature writers" and have admired how she goes beyond observation to truly inhabit her experiences in the wild. She is a gifted memoirist whose encounters with the natural world and exotic places open our hearts and minds to change, love, loss, success, failure, suffering, and death.
Early in Unsolaced, she states that she has moved 28 times since she came of age and then confesses: "Pushed by war, love, famine, boredom, geopolitics, racism and curiosity, we are always on the run."
Later she reflects: "Change is never nonchalant. The dynamism of soil, ice, climate, weather and cellular structures has been underestimated. Peace is chaos singing."
Always willing to learn, Ehrlich is tutored by a mentor named Mike in the cowboy legacy which includes honesty, straightforwardness, and humor and a deep etiquette." She learns that working with a horse is "not dominating with fear, but more like dancing with a partner. It's all balance, timing, rhythm, the kind of dancing where your body and his body become one." Throughout the book, she is always finding someone to teach her more about living a full and rich life.
Questing in rugged and far-away places is like the search for a holy grail to the author who tests her mettle, values, and courage in Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan and a remote Alaskan island. Her accounts of these travels are always detailed and engaging -- and also a little sad, for in all these regions she witnesses the deterioration of the planet.
Throughout Unsolaced, she admits she is still assimilating "the sharp lessons of impermanence" and that "loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life."
