Sarah Capdeville
Montana-based nature and environmental writer
Winner of the River Teeth 2022 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize
2019 Finalist for Montana Prize in Nonfiction
Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost
Essays on Solitude and Landscape
"The essays in this gorgeous collection weave a story of geographies--emotional, linguistic, cultural, and intellectual--undergirded by a voice so compelling I could not put it down. . . . Aligning the Glacier's Ghost is a remarkable debut."
—Nathasha Trethewey, author of Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
"These gorgeous essays capture the deep beauty of wildness within and outside of us. The book is a clear-eyed, all-inclusive celebration of what blurs and bores, what freezes, aches, grieves, and soars. Capdeville embraces the whole: glaciers, meadows, rivers, fires, elk, bear, goshawks, and huckleberries. Pickups, parking lots, and operating rooms, too. In Aligning the Glacier's Ghost, all is connected and all is in motion. 'I've panned for silver linings,' Capdeville writes, 'and found only chaos.' What magnificent chaos it is."
—Ana Maria Spagna, author of Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre
selected essays
“Thursday’s Crossword”
The second pandemic winter, I become a third-generation crossword solver. I follow my grandma, with her penciled workbooks beside a women’s bible or two, a flyswatter, buds of yarn turned afghans for every one of her thirteen grandchildren. Then my father, with his years of folded newspaper on a clipboard succeeded by a New York Times digital subscription, asking me about phrases in Spanish or literary references.
“The Long View”
Sickness works like this. There is something foreign in the body. A virus, a bloom of bacteria, havoc of single-celled organisms in the gut. The immune system blitzes what is unwanted—cells suffocating others that shouldn’t be there, purging the respiratory or digestive systems, amping up a fever to shatter a virus to bits. You feel sluggish, drained, exhausted. Then the body rids itself of the unwanted, or medicine pitches in. You get better, or you die. Don’t forget this part: the binary we’re taught of disease.
“Landscape through a Lens of Disability”
Across the roadbed, three prints press into a scuff of snow. I recognize them right away—snowshoe hare tracks, two hard-nailed hind feet in front, tailed behind by a single print where smaller front paws overlap nearly one on top of the other. The rest of the roadbed is marbled in packed ice, scribbled in boot prints, dog tracks, squirrel bounds. The snowshoe hare prints hop off the path into a copse of dense firs, the needled ground bare and brown.
about
For five seasons, Sarah Capdeville proudly wore the title of wilderness ranger in the Rattlesnake, Welcome Creek, and Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness areas of Western and Central Montana. She is currently part of the editorial teams of The Hopper and The Changing Time. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, and graduated from the University of Montana with a BS in Resource Conservation and a BA in Spanish. Her writing has been published in Orion, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, Flyway, and others. She has been a Pushcart nominee as well as a finalist for the Montana Prize in Nonfiction. She is the winner of River Teeth's 2022 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, and her essay collection Aligning the Glacier's Ghost is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in spring 2024. Sarah lives in Missoula, Montana, with her partner, retired greyhound, and opinionated tortoiseshell cat, where she navigates chronic illness, goes on many slow hikes, and daydreams about the crosscut saw.