2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year
Finalist, Essays (Adult Nonfiction)
The mountains of the American West are the setting for healing and personal development in this collection of lyrical essays. From forest fires to mountain lions, an Ohio farm to a Colorado cabin, and from violation to silence to reclamation, Kathryn Winograd draws keen attention to the details that braid her own history with that of the land on which she dwells with her husband and daughters, and with that of anyone who has experienced loss and fought for renewal. The essays become a ring of concentric circles, where one builds upon the next to achieve deeper meaning and truth, revealing mercy at its center. Finalist, Foreword INDIES Award. Order through Amazon or Bower House
Phantom Canyon is a rich read, not an easy one. It can be almost painfully introspective, and is occasionally so abstract as to almost come untethered. Almost. It always lands safely, grounded by earth and life itself. The narrative has a rhythm like a heartbeat, a pulsing meditation on how to live with fear and doubt, violation and loss, how to circle back and love the world after all. —Story Circle Book Reviews
Dig with a pen, said poet Seamus Heaney. Kathryn Winograd uses a pickax to excavate old pains and buried memories as part of a personal reclamation project in this collection of essays. Like the douser she hires in “Finding the Well,” she has an unerring instinct for what lies deep below the surface and is willing to drill down until she hits it. —Foreword Reviews, 2014 INDIES Finalist
In the course of these lyrical prose pieces, we will learn what we miss while also entering Winograd’s past as she integrates the rape she experienced as a young woman in Ohio during an era of silent shaming. In the author’s hearing, a female classmate asks another, “Why would anyone want to rape her?”
This essay leaves the reader pained and awed that Winograd survived such treatment yet can still create miraculous beauty from the unholy horror. This same beauty is evident everywhere in Phantom Canyon.
—Annie Dawid, Flatirons Literary Review
flatironsliteraryreview.com/2015/01/08/phantom-canyon-essays-of-reclamation-by-kathryn-winograd/
“Winograd finds the most unlikely containers for the most urgent subjects. How does one reconcile, in the natural world, science and faith? Eyes, mind, and heart wide open, Winograd shows us what she can hold in her hand—shotguns, bird eggs, mushroom spores—and tilts our chins up to study the night sky . . . The very best books invent their own genres and Winograd’s Phantom Canyon has done just that. The shimmering syntax, the metaphor, the way the patterned images add up to something that wasn’t there before—that’s the lyric. But there’s also a story there. Phantom Canyon is a page-turner, a collection of lyric essays you won’t be able to put down. As a writer, teacher, mother, daughter, and survivor, I needed this book. You do, too.” —Jill Christman, author, Darkroom: A Family Exposure
“In Phantom Canyon Kathryn Winograd takes her place among America’s most celebrated writers—Thoreau and Annie Dillard come immediately to mind—who turn to the violence and beauty of nature to spark deeper understandings of the human community, and of the body and mind. Winograd adds to the mix her own insistence to confront even the most violent personal trauma—her own experience being raped as a child. For Kathryn Winograd the lyrical imagination, spiritual healing, and the love of beauty everywhere around us, come most fully alive only through recognizing also the harsher realities of the human condition . . . Winograd offers us the fullness and frailty of her own life, the natural world and the people she loves.” —Stephen Haven, author, The Last Sacred Place in North America
Kathryn Winograd 