Creative Nonfiction
The Season of Birds and Stones
These essays grapple with questions of what wilderness means and how we can interact with and learn from other species. Set in some of our most stunning public lands, including Denali National Park and Preserve, Great Basin National Park, Isle Royale National Park, and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Renfro’s essays examine her encounters with bears, arctic ground squirrels, loons, red-winged blackbirds, moose, and wolves, as she wrestles with a range of subjects including motherhood, mental illness, grief, and darkness. Both deeply personal and meticulously researched, Renfro’s essays seek to illuminate the natural world and show its deep relevance and resonance in all of our lives.
Creative Nonfiction
Xylotheque
Combining memoir and nature writing, this book comprises nine essays that represent different seasons and slices of time, not unlike the rings of a tree. No two rings are alike, but each accretes to the next, creating, section by section, a life. Xylotheque won the Sarton Memoir Award from the Story Circle Network, was a finalist for the Women Writing the West WILLA Literary Award, and a semifinalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature.
Fiction
A Catalogue of Everything in the World
Winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press, A Catalogue of Everything in the World is a collection of linked short stories that explores the lives of characters dealing with unexpected change and loss: a bus driver mourning the death of his infant, an octogenarian preparing for death, a girl trying to cope with her parents’ divorce, and a woman whose obsession with a decades-old crime has taken over her life.