Acclaimed Author to Join UM as Kittredge Distinguished Writer
MISSOULA – Amy Irvine, winner of the Orion Book Award, will serve as the 2024 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer in Environmental Studies at the University of Montana.
Her nonfiction book, “Desert Cabal,” is a fierce and provocative, feminist response to Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” the canonical book about the American desert.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication, Irvine names and questions the “lone male narrative” – white and privileged as it is – that still has its boots planted firmly at the center of today’s wilderness movement, even as she celebrates the lens through which Abbey taught so many to love the wild remains of the nation.
“The natural world is changing at breakneck speed,” said Irvine. “The human IQ is in measurable decline. So what stories do we tell now? How do we tell them – and to whom? More than ever, writers are tasked with rousing readers from profound levels of intellectual, emotional, spiritual and physical lethargy – the heft of this task can overwhelm.”
“Irvine is asking all the right questions,” said Mark Sundeen, UM assistant professor of Environmental Studies. “Finally someone has the guts to wrassle Abbey off the pedestal back down to the red dirt where he belongs. Her combination of memoir, criticism and reportage breathes new life into writing about the natural world.”
At UM, Irvine will teach a graduate workshop in environmental writing next spring.
“To teach writing in this moment that too often feels apocalyptic but also brims with wondrous possibility – and to teach it in a program I’ve long admired – is both an honor and act of devotion,” she said.
From Norwood, Colorado, Irvine is author of two memoirs: “Trespass,” which won the 2009 Orion Book Award, and “Almost Animal,” a widely anticipated story about motherhood and the climate crisis to be published by Spiegel and Grau in 2024.
Her nonfiction has appeared in Orion, Outside, High Country News, and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She has taught at the MountainView MFA program, Fishtrap, Orion Writing Workshops and many other venues.
Previous Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writers in Environmental Studies include Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, Craig Childs and, most recently, Sierra Crane Murdoch.
UM graduate students interested in Irvine’s writing workshop can email mark.sundeen@umontana.edu.
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Contact: Mark Sundeen, UM Environmental Studies assistant professor, 406-243-6272, mark.sundeen@mso.umt.edu.