Slow Arrow: Unearthing The Frail Children

by Kathryn Winograd

Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children explores in the microcosm of a forty-acre high mountain meadow and its surrounding lands vast worlds of ecological and familial migrations. The announcement by her eighty-five-year-old mother that she would be moving to Colorado to live out her last years sparks Winograd into a journey into what it means to be a steward of a land and its inhabitants she knows little about and steward of a grieving mother sliding irrevocably into the blindness she fears and the dying for which she longs.



Expanded gold mines, drought-induced wildfires, sudden aspen decline, solitary hawks and summer-pastured longhorns, coyote and elusive cougar, fairy trumpets: as Winograd takes her mother on an exploration of the inhabitants of this deceptively remote and arid landscape in southwest Colorado at the “back” of Pikes Peak, she begins to discover its metaphorical connections to the emotional family landscape she now lives in.



In this collection of essays, Winograd braids together the pressing environmental issues of today with the sacred and profane intersections of the human and the natural world .

114 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 16, 2020

Reviews

[Nina Little · Rating 5 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed Winograd’s highly lyrical and philosophical essays. As a Rocky Mountain girl, who has lived all over Colorado, I especially enjoyed Winograd’s tales of her remote cabin in the Colorado high country. These stories pulled on my deeply sentimental heartstrings and brought back memories of my family’s old brick house in the former mining town turned ski resort of Crested Butte. I also related to Winograd’s struggles with the loss of her father and aging mother, children growing up fast and leaving the nest (I also have twins), and growing concerns for the environment and our country’s future. Winograd has a special ability to connect the human world and the concepts of ethics, aging and death, with ancient mythology and natural wonders (like spider webs, fossils, and butterfly wings). I felt this book on a deep level and it prompted me to slow down and reflect upon the natural order and passage of time, as well as, what it means to be a steward of the land and protector of my children’s future. A powerful, haunting, and highly evocative work.

[Lizabeth Netzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.” – Carl Jung

This quotation, one of several gems sprinkled throughout Kathryn Winograd’s stunning, thought-provoking collection of essays, could well be its overarching epigraph. The author’s conscientious search for meaning in her everyday experience—sometimes baffling, sometimes painful, sometimes epiphanic—infuses every piece. With lyrical, hypnotically beautiful prose, she invites the reader into the areligious spiritual quest of a singularly deep thinker.

The setting which contextualizes the book is life in a charming cabin built on a 40-acre stretch of rural land to which Winograd, her husband, and lately, her aged mother (who has come to Colorado to spend her last days), retreat from urban life. There, they cocoon, read, write and hike the surrounding hills.

The complex literary form that Winograd has perfected is described as the “braided essay,” in which interwoven topics, metaphors and images that seem initially unrelated end up coalescing into surprising significance. In every deftly honed line, Winograd expresses a poet’s wild joy in words, her delight in knowing the names and origins of things. As she explores with fathomless curiosity elements of nature, history, law, literature, and the motivations of the human heart, we are carried along with her, our own passion for knowledge refreshed. We experience vicariously her reverence for the smallest scraps of natural beauty, her hawk-eyed attention to the most unheralded details of the physical and emotional landscape.

The collection is necessarily veiled in melancholy, as it addresses themes of cruelty, loss, decay, destruction and extinction. But the message that ultimately emerges, as Winograd gives equal time and attention to wonder, beauty, rebirth and redemption, is that only through knowing the darkness can we fully grasp the precious significance of the light.

--Liz Netzel

[Carol Guerrero-Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These non-fiction essays reflect on family, land, and time, while also celebrating everything it is to be alive during difficult times (as they always are). If you enjoy rich, poetic writing and want to see a most beautiful mind at work, please pick up this book. I was enthralled and moved. The book just won an IPPY (Independent Publishers) bronze medal for creative non-fiction, so don't just take my word for it.

[Laura Julier · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the best kind of lyrical wandering, these linked ewssays grow out of a place--beloved, disappointing, challenging, and richly inhabited by both creatures and memory. Winograd's pondering ranges across questions of migration, habitat destruction, responsibility, the will to exist, and the spiritual life of a nonspiritual person. The book takes its time and, in heartbreakingly beautiful prose, forces us to slow down. Impressionist pieces of personal story and natural history accumulate and excavate an emotional landscape from within the physical one, compelling us onward through the sheer pleasure of seeing how she keeps all the story threads in line.

[Mary Kurtz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slow Arrow is a remarkable example of the braided essay form. Kathy Winograd achieves this by drawing upon the disciplines of philosophy, mythology, astronomy, western and regional history, environmental policy,
family ties, and an evocation of the natural world. To be read when one has time to absorb Winograd's deeply layered writing and beautiful poetic imagery and sight.

[Sarah M. Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathy’s prose brings lyrical delight. This beautiful essay collection considers the way we have trespassed on the natural world alongside the beauty from ashes we find here, as well as time, space, faith, a mother fading slowly.