October 30, 2001
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@sa.ucsb.edu
Celebrated author Gretel Ehrlich to read
at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
Summary Facts:
- Gretel Ehrlich
- Writer’s Reading: This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland
- A compelling portrait of one of the world’s least known places and cultures
- Author of the classic The Solace of Open Spaces
- Co-presented by Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and UCSB Arts & Lectures
- Tuesday, December 4
- 7:30 pm / SB Museum of Natural History
- General public $6 / UCSB students and SBMNH members $5
- For tickets & information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Acclaimed Gaviota-based writer Gretel Ehrlich will read from her latest book This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland on Tuesday, December 4 at 7:30 pm at the SB Museum of Natural History, 2559 Puesta del Sol Road, Santa Barbara. This Cold Heaven chronicles seven years of visits to Greenland, where Ehrlich explored the lifestyle and culture of the Inuit people. The book is a journey into unimaginable terrain, filled with spellbinding sketches of her experiences. Over her career of three volumes of poetry, two books of narrative essays, two collections of short stories, a novel, a novella for young adults and two memoirs, Ehrlich has proven to be one of our most acute and fearless chroniclers of the natural world. As Ehrlich herself wrote in her now classic The Solace of Open Spaces: “Keenly observed the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”
Ehrlich began a career as a filmmaker after graduating from UCLA film school. While working on a documentary about four elderly shepherds in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming she fell in love with the land and lifestyle, becoming a rancher herself. Her experiences led to her first book The Solace of Open Spaces (Viking 1986), which Pulitzer-Prize winner Annie Dillard called: “Vivid, tough, and funny...Wyoming has found its Whitman...an exuberant and powerful book.” Since then her work has explored the intricate twinning of the spiritual and natural, whether in the pilgrimage chronicle Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist (Beacon 1997) or the biography John Muir: Nature’s Visionary (National Geographic Society 2000).
Ehrlich lives in Gaviota. In fact Santa Barbara plays a crucial healing role in her memoir A Match to the Heart: One Woman’s Story of Being Struck By Lightning (Penguin 1995), as it was at Cottage Hospital that she began her painstaking recovery from near death.
This reading is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the SB Museum of Natural History. It is part of an on-going collaboration bringing major writers to the Santa Barbara area; previous readings in the series were by W.S. Merwin and T.C. Boyle. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Ehrlich will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
Ticket prices are $6 for the general public and $5 for UCSB students and SBMNH members. Tickets are on sale now and may be purchased the night of the reading, if available, beginning at 6:30 pm at the Museum.
For tickets or more information, call the
SB Museum of Natural History at (805) 682-4711
or UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.