Slow Arrow: Unearthing The Frail Children Book News and Awards

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Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children wins Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Awards.

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SlowArrow: Unearthing the Frail Children is a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist for 2020.

As part of its mission to discover, review, and share the best books from university and independent publishers, Foreword Magazine, Inc. hosts an annual awards program each year. Finalists represent the best books published in 2020. After more than 2,000 individual titles spread across 55 genres were submitted for consideration, the Finalists were determined by Foreword’s editorial team. Winners will be decided by an expert team of booksellers and librarians—representing Foreword’s trade readership—from across the country.

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Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children is a Finalist for the Colorado Author League 2021 Writing Awards. CAL recognizes multiple works published across several different genres in fiction and nonfiction. This year more than 120 members took part in the contest of published works.

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View the Video Book Trailer

Review at River Teeth: Bathing (Again) at 9600 Feet

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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: read more at Saddle Road Press.

Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books and Indie Bound. Find all links through Saddle Road Press.

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Slow Arrow, Unearthing the Frail Children, by Kathy Winograd excavates beauty from stone. It extracts gossamer from granite. Her frail children are butterflies that spend the last stage of their brief lives mimicking the beauty of the earth.  They are leaves fossilized in stone. In this beautiful and evocative book about a dying mother, dying animals, and a stricken, dying planet, we realize that we and the world around us are all frail children following, inexorably, the slow arrow of time.—Steven Harvey author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder.

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Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children is the best kind of lyrical wandering. These linked essays grow out of a place—beloved, disappointing, challenging, and richly inhabited by both creatures and memory. Winograd’s pondering ranges across and between questions of migration, habitat destruction, responsibility, the will to exist, and the spiritual life of a nonspiritual person Slow Arrow takes its time, and in the process, with heartbreakingly beautiful prose, forces readers to slow down. Bit by bit, Winograd dabs like an Impressionist pieces of personal story and natural history, accumulating and excavating an emotional landscape from within the physical one in which she lives–compelling readers onward simply for the sheer pleasure of seeing how she keeps all the story threads in line.  —Laura Julier, editor, Fourth Genre

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Reading Slow Arrow, I’m in awe of Kathryn Winograd’s artistry. In these ten essays, plus a preface and a coda, she interweaves an oft-rhapsodic syntax with a deft commingling of disparate subjects; she lingers on her contrastive solitudes, a Rocky Mountain cabin at 9600 feet, rife with wildness, and a Denver suburb, haunted by family tragedies; and she shifts between moods playful, literate, and grave so facilely that their consequent structures seem almost improvised. Winograd is daring the lyric essay to grow even more expressively diverse than it has to date. Such incitement of the form few writers attempt, let alone succeed at, and this book places her among America’s finest essayists.–Tom Larson, Author of Spirituality and the Writer

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“Kathryn Winograd’s Slow Arrow blends narratives of family, region, and culture in simultaneously lyrical and observant ways. The reader feels present at the most intimate and immediate openings of the author’s synapses, inhabiting memory, emotion, and insight as it happens for her. A phenomenal achievement, powerful and haunting.”—Robert Root, author of Happenstance and Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place and editor of Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place

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A beautifully crafted, eclectic, collection. Part philosophical speculation, part mythology, part family history, part environmental and social critique, these braided lyric essays on place pulse with felt life. In Slow Arrow, Kathy Winograd offers us reflective meditations on such natural phenomena as physical beauty, migration, gravitational waves, and fossils, among others, in addition to explorations of larger, universal matters–illness, death, and mortality.—-Michael Steinberg , Founding Editor, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction

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The Humble Essayist on Slow Arrow Unearthing the Frail Children

We are celebrating a new book of braided, lyrical essays written by poet and essayist, Kathryn Winograd, published this week by Saddle Road Press. Called Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, the book about change and loss weaves many threads: the fragile beauty of the Colorado Rockies, the migration of animals, unearthed fossils, gravitational waves, the arrow of time, dying animals, and a warming planet to name a few. One thread includes her aging mother who suffers from macular degeneration and hopes to die before she goes completely blind. In the essay “Skyglow” Winograd offers her mother a gift: the possibility of a luminosity that outlasts our lives. . . .The Humble Essayist.