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Gretchen Legler wins ASLE Award |
Gretchen Legler's On the Ice was chosen as the best book of
environmental creative writing published in 2005-2006 by the
Association for the Study of Literture and the Environment.
The judges, SueEllen Campbell (Colorado State University), Ian
Marshall (Penn State Altoona) and Sheryl St. Germain (Chatham College),
liked the book's ability (like it's author) to go beyond boundaries
and redefine the terms of nature writing.
"Legler pays
as much attention to human life and social interaction at McMurdo
Station as she does to the harsh life outside of it; her work presents
an eloquent argument for seeing humans and human drama as part of, not
separate from, nature."
"In a genre that so often features the first person,
the almost-daring intimacy of Legler's book makes us think about how all
those first persons we encounter in nature writing get constructed in
fairly limited or limiting ways. Not here, though—it’s not just
the immediacy of the first person encounters with Antarctic ice that
draws us in, but the intimacy as well. On the Ice is a multifaceted love
story, the story of a woman's searchfor self-love, the story of her
desire for an extreme landscape, and the story of the surprising love
she discovers for one she finds thriving in that landscape."
The award was presented at the ASLE conference held in June 2007.
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