★ Playing with Wildfire

Laura Pritchett, Torrey House Press (FEB 13) Softcover $18.95 (250pp) 978-1-948814-89-8

Laura Pritchett’s Playing with Wildfire is a rare climate novel of now. It begins in late August, as a megafire started by a visiting hiker sweeps through Colorado along with COVID-19. Prose, poetry, plays, government grant applications, astrological natal charts, obituaries, graffiti, and maps distill the impossible weight of a rural community and planet in distress into a plea to “think of all who have loved this place” and demand radical, restorative action.

A work of great heart and imagination, the novel utilizes multiple forms and perspectives to construct its narrative. As one character states, winking at the meta: “like the pandemic, these megafires present a new type of suffering—both for land and human. The suffering feels like experimentation. Requires new stories told in unique forms and techniques.” There’s also tenacious attention paid to the warts-and-all truth of rural Colorado, preventing abstractions.

The book’s protagonists range from various wild animals escaping the fire to the mountains the fire ravaged; they include emergency services personnel and locals too. All struggle to process the grief and rage of knowing—that these tragedies were predicted and predictable; that their present crises cannot be undone; that proximity, or the lack thereof, is a crucial ingredient for action and empathy; and that their community’s geographical and emotional distance from decision makers, pundits, and lobbyists means no one is likely to listen to their plea that “the planet is burning. We need to get the fires out. Then we can discuss other stuff.”

Fierce, vivid, and closely observed, Playing with Wildfire is an exercise in paying attention. And if “attention is the most basic form of love,” the earth is not the only thing in danger. Love is an endangered ecology too, and there is an inherent mutualism to what’s required for healing.