Renata Golden

Portal

This essay was awarded the 2020 Penenlope Niven Creative Nonfiction honorable mention from the Center for Women Writers. About this essay, judge Alison Stine writes "I kept coming back to this piece, both for its language, which is lyrical and memborable, as well as the sotry, which is the simplest story of all: love. But the writer expands on the definition of love, learning to love herself even in the absence of the companion the narrator calls simply No Word. Some things resist definition, are everything and nothing. Love is also a landscape..."

Selected Works

Personal essays

Hammer Test

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.

Mountain Time

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."

Groundhog Days

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.

Bird Families

"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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