Renata Golden

Newsletter

Current newsletter

Author appearances supporting the launch of Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment are happening throughout March, 2024. Check the Events page at renatagolden.com for the latest dates and times.

Past newsletters

Click the headings under READ PAST NEWSLETTERS on the left to get caught up on recent events. Be sure to subscribe if you would like to be notified about upcoming events. Hope to see you soon!

July 2023: Storyknife accepting applications until August 31, 2023

Apply for a residency at Storyknife in Home, Alaska. My experience there was wonderful - I got a lot of writing done and felt well cared for while doing it. Plus the food and the scenery are terrific! If you are a woman-identified writer, 21 years of age or older, apply now!

Here's more information:

Residencies at Storyknife are either for two or four weeks. Resident's food and lodging is covered during the period of their residency, but travel to and from Homer, Alaska, is the responsibility of the resident. Residents stay in individual cabins & dine at the main house. An on-staff chef is responsible for food preparation. Four week residencies begin on the 1st of each month and end on the 28th. Two week residencies begin on the 1st of each month and end on the 14th OR begin on the 15th and end on the 28th. Residencies are available April through October.

Go here to apply: https://storyknife.org/how-to-apply/

Selected Works

Personal essays

In the battle between Chiricahua leopard frogs and American bullfrogs, the only available options are to kill American bullfrogs directly or kill Chiricahua leopard frogs indirectly. We are responsible by doing something, and we're responsible by doing nothing.

From the Chiricahua Mountains in the desert southwest to Cnoc na dTobar in County Kerry, the heartbeat messages a mountain carries continue an ancient conversation.

Guardian of the Garden

This essay in the anthology When Birds Are Near from Cornell University Press was published in October 2020. The anthology features essays from a myriad of writers, some well known and some better known—all interesting.

What the Two Percent Are Saying

"Studies have shown that prairie dogs have one of the largest vocabularies in the animal kingdom, with more sophisticated language skills than whales, dolphins, or parrots. Prairie dogs have ... a call for human and can add syllables to that call to say tall human in a blue shirt and thin human in a white shirt and short, fat human in a yellow shirt. A prairie dog in Utah can invent a new call for something she has never seen before, and a prairie dog in Colorado will understand what that call means the first time he hears it. Prairie dogs do not need dictionaries."

This essay looks at the Bosnian War in the context of a power outage in in Texas in February, 2021 that left 4.5 million homes and businesses powerless and almost 15 million people with either dirty water or none at all, some for several days. The "massive electricity generation failure" even has its own Wikipedia entry. More than a hundred people died, including an eleven-year-old Conroe boy who froze to death in his bed.

"Birds are born knowing that some day they will leave everything familiar and travel, sometimes thousands of miles, to a place they have never been, to eat foods they have never tasted."

Poetry

How I Spend My New Summers

"How I Spend My New Summers" in Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher's Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration

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