Have you ever felt that someone touched your soul? And, as a result of your meeting, left it just a little fuller? That's exactly how I felt after talking with Laura Pritchett. She is a writer, an award-winning author, a lover of all things nature and an advocate for it's survival. We talk about how the core themes in her work are stories of the precarity of life. Laura shares her own precarious story and how this prompted her writing, "Making Friends with Death: A Field Guide to your Impeding Last Breath". This conversation came just at the right time for me. Connecting with the natural world has become a big part of my healing: physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Laura Pritchett is a mere mortal who will someday die—and she’s doing a little better with that fact now! She’s also the author of nine books. She began her writing journey with the short story collection Hell’s Bottom, Colorado, which won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. This was followed by the novels Sky Bridge, Stars Go Blue, Red Lightning, and The Blue Hour. Her novels have received starred reviews from Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, and School Library Journal, and The Blue Hour was listed as one of the “Top 5 books that will make you think about what it is to be human” by PBS and made the Booklist Editor’s Choice for 2017.

She also has two nonfiction books: Great Colorado Bear Stories and Making Friends with Death: A Field Guide to Your Impending Last Breath. She’s also involved with environmental issues, and is the editor of three anthologies about conservation: Pulse of the River, Home Land, and Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers.

Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Sun, The New York Times, Salon, High Country News, The Millions, Pinch, The Normal School, Publisher’s Weekly, Brain, Child, and many others.

She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University