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Notable American Women Writers

Gretel Ehrlich

by Peter D. Olson

Essayist, Fiction Writer, and Poet

Born: January 21, 1946, Santa Barbara, California

Biography

Though Gretel Ehrlich was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, she has since 1976 made her home—spiritually and physically—in Wyoming. She attended Bennington College, the University of California, the Los Angeles Film School, and the New School for Social Research, but her writings also clearly indicate that she learned from the natural landscape to which she was drawn. She created a home for herself in Shell, Wyoming, dividing her time between writing, ranching, sheepherding, and traveling in Greenland and the Arctic. Ehrlich writes in a variety of genres but seems most at home in her essays in which she offers new ways to grasp the interconnectedness of the landscape and people of the western United States (with a focus on indigenous peoples, polar regions, and climate change. In 1991, Ehrlich was struck by lightning and took several years to recuperate—writing about the experience in A Match to the Heart (1994).

Analysis

Gretel Ehrlich’s best works bind a natural process (often an event in the western weather or a dominant feature of a natural landscape) with a corresponding human emotion or shift in human perception. She encourages readers not merely to “see” these natural processes as mirrors of the human condition but rather to use them to focus on their own thinking about the necessity of living in landscapes (physical or emotional, urban or rural, eastern or western)—landscapes that can shift in a moment from harsh confrontation to joyful support.

Ehrlich’s first nonfiction collection, The Solace of Open Spaces, contains twelve essays that began as journal entries Ehrlich made during the filming of a Public Broadcasting Service documentary on Wyoming sheepherding. During the project, Ehrlich learned that her lover (and partner in the documentary) had a terminal illness. Returning to the isolation of Shell after his death, she wrote, “Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us. . . . We might also learn how to carry space inside ourselves in the effortless way we carry our skins.” Ehrlich blends the landscape of northern Wyoming with the healing properties of silence, emptiness, and simplicity in a way that is reminiscent of the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

The primary subject of her 1988 novel, Heart Mountain, is the experience of Japanese Americans interned during World War II at the internment camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. She manages to convey the horror of a foreign war even as she barely mentions the war itself. This war, in a way similar to the “space” Ehrlich writes about in The Solace of Open Spaces, dominates through its very absence.

In A Match to the Heart, Ehrlich describes how her wakefulness and her very life were put to an extreme test: Walking with her dogs immediately before an August thunderstorm in the Wyoming mountains, she was struck by lightning and nearly killed. Waking from the strike itself, she first thinks about her dogs, then tries to remember the correct Buddhist instruction regarding dying. What follows in this intensely autobiographical book is less an account of the lightning strike itself than of the difficulty Ehrlich encountered in finding sympathetic medical professionals capable of helping her return to a sense of normality and a restored sense of self. A Match to the Heart finally returns, solidly, to the power of space itself as Ehrlich recalls the themes that invigorate her best writing.

Ehrlich continued to be most noted for her nature essays, which began to encompass more diverse geographies. Ehrlich wrote Questions of Heaven after taking a type of pilgrimage to China. During the seven years after the lightning strike, Ehrlich journeyed through Greenland on several occasions. Her insights and understandings gained during these visits are explored in This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

Ehrlich’s writings often evoke the spirit of a traditional Zen koan: The enhanced perceptions of those who remain awakened in an empty natural landscape entirely fill the emptiness in that space.

Achievements

Ehrlich won the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), and the Whiting Writers’ Award, Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, (1987). Ehrlich has won many awards, including: PEN Thoreau Award (2010), a Bellagio Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Expedition Council Grants from the National Geographic Society for “circumpolar travel in the high Arctic.”

Selected Works

Nonfiction

1 

The Solace of Open Spaces, 1985

2 

Islands, the Universe, Home, 1991

3 

A Match to the Heart, 1994

4 

Yellowstone: Land of Fire and Ice, 1995

5 

Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist, 1997

6 

Cowboy Island: Farewell to a Ranching Legacy, 2000

7 

John Muir: Nature’s Visionary, 2000

8 

This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, 2001

9 

The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold, 2004

10 

In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, 2010

11 

Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami, 2013

Short Stories

12 

Wyoming Stories, 1986

13 

Heart Mountain, 1988

14 

Drinking Dry Clouds: Stories from Wyoming, 1991

Poetry

15 

Geode/Rock Body, 1970

16 

To Touch the Water, 1981

17 

Arctic Heart: A Poem Cycle, 1992

Children’s/Young Adult Book

18 

A Blizzard Year: Timmy’s Almanac of the Seasons, 1999

Selected Bibliography

19 

Kaza, Stephanie. “Gretel Ehrlich.” American Nature Writers, Vol. 1 in The Scribner Writers Series, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996. A good introductory essay, which provides biographical information, a discussion of her important works up to Yellowstone: Land of Fire and Ice, and analysis placing her within the context of American nature writers.

20 

Morris, Gregory L. Gretel Ehrlich. No. 150 in the Boise State U Western Writers series, edited by James H. Maguire and Tara Penry, Boise State UP, 2001. The first comprehensive study on Ehrlich. Includes bibliographical references.

21 

Nelson, Barney. “Gretel Ehrlich.” Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, 2nd series, Vol. 212 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Richard H. Cracroft, Gale, 1999. A solid essay providing biographical information and addressing Ehrlich’s work through Questions from Heaven.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Olson, Peter D. "Gretel Ehrlich." Notable American Women Writers, edited by Laura Nicosia & James F. Nicosia, Salem Press, 2020. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AWWrite_0098.
APA 7th
Olson, P. D. (2020). Gretel Ehrlich. In L. Nicosia & J. F. Nicosia (Eds.), Notable American Women Writers. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Olson, Peter D. "Gretel Ehrlich." Edited by Laura Nicosia & James F. Nicosia. Notable American Women Writers. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2020. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.