Creative Tensions: Living with Wildfire | Featuring Alison Turner and Paul Rogers

Please join us at Salt Lake City Public Library, Conference Room B, at 6:30pm for an evening dedicated to wildfire narratives, featuring Alison Turner, debut author of Defensible Spaces, and Paul Rogers, a forest ecologist and Director of the Western Aspen Alliance at Utah State University. This event is co-hosted by The King’s English Bookshop and Torrey House Press, and facilitated by THP Co-Executive Director Will Neville-Rehbehn.

We invite you into a collective discussion through an innovative format co-developed by IDEO and the Sundance Institute Theatre Program. Speakers and audience members will reveal where they stand on a topic by where they stand in the room. This inspiring live experience challenges us to explore our complex relationships related to living with wildfire in the West.

In Turner’s debut collection Defensible Spaces, residents of Clayton, Colorado, must learn to live with what has burned and what threatens to ignite. Throughout ten linked short stories, townspeople work through relationships with alcoholism, history, and each other, negotiating where and when to create their own defensible spaces that might, but will not always, keep them protected.

“Fire plays a key role in Turner’s observant debut collection. Turner’s assured prose brings emotional depth. This is a worthy addition to the fiction of the American West.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

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Bio | Alison Turner
Alison Turner grew up in the mountains of Colorado, where she learned to endure large amounts of time in inclement weather waiting for buses. She is the co-host and co-creator of the When you are homeless podcast miniseries, and her creative work appears in Blue Mesa Review, Wordrunner eChapbooks, Little Patuxent Review, Meridian, and Bacopa Literary Review, among others. Turner facilitates writing groups and consults with writers who are experiencing homelessness. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Bio | Paul Rogers
Paul holds degrees in geography from Utah State University (BS) and University of Wisconsin (MS). His doctorate is from USU in Ecology. Dr. Rogers’ ecosystem monitoring research has taken him around North America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Dept. of Environment & Society, a USU Ecology Center Associate, and the Director of the Western Aspen Alliance. He has published more than 50 professional and technical papers and appeared in media print, video/TV, and online content more than 100 times. Paul has taught Environmental Problem-Solving, Natural Resource Monitoring, Intro. to Environmental Science, and Planet Earth for honors students, as well as co-organized and spoken at more than 40 professional workshops.