Kelly Ramsey joins the Exchange to discuss her new memoir, "Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West."
ABOUT
Kelly Ramsey studied poetry at the University of Virginia and fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She co-founded The Lighthouse Works artists residency and later moved to northern California, where she worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a trail maintenance worker, a wilderness ranger and wildland firefighter. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Sierra magazine, and other media. Kelly Ramsey now lives in Redding, California and she’s the author of a new book, “Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West.”
From Simon & Schuster
When Kelly Ramsey drives over a California mountain pass to join an elite firefighting crew, she’s terrified that she won’t be able to keep up with the intense demands of the job. Not only will she be the only woman on this hotshot crew and their first in ten years, she’ll also be among the oldest. As she trains relentlessly to overcome the crew’s skepticism and gain their respect, megafires erupt across the West, posing an increasing danger both on the job and back home. In vivid prose that evokes the majesty of Northern California’s forests, Kelly takes us on the ground to see how major wildfires are fought and to lay bare the psychological toll, the bone-deep weariness, and the unbreakable camaraderie that emerge in the face of nature’s fury.
Despite the wear and tear of her rookie year in fire, Kelly gears up for a second season, determined to prove that not only can a woman survive this work, she can excel. But when her plans to marry her partner start to crumble and sparks fly with a fellow crew member, Kelly wrestles with whether she’s truly outgrown the self-destructive patterns she’s learned from her father, whose drinking and itinerant ways haunt her. And as the season wears on, she discovers how tenuous “belonging” can be amid ever-changing crew dynamics.
In this vivid, visceral, and intimate memoir, Kelly wrestles with the immense power of fire for both destruction and renewal, confronted with the questions: Which fires do you fight, and which do you let burn you clean?
