Welcome

Gretchen is a teacher, adventurer, farmer, gardener, ecofeminist scholar and writer whose intimate essays and memoirs have deeply moved readers and have contributed to the new face of American nature writing. Her stories weave keen observations and luminous descriptions of the natural world with moving insights about what it means to come into  one’s sexual identity, discover true love, make  sense of painful family relationships, and embark upon the journey toward selfhood.

Gretchen’s lyric essay in Brevity, an online magazine of brief nonfiction, was recently nominated for a Puschart Prize. Check it Out at:http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/pastissuestwo/brev35/legler_things.html

On The Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station Antarctica (Milkweed Editions, 2005) won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s award for best environmental creative writing, and was runner up for the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for lesbian nonfiction.

The book is a collection of linked essays about Antarctica, where Gretchen spent six months as a fellow with the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers Program. Read the rest of this entry »

Work from her first collection of essays, All The Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook (Seal Press, 1995), has won two Pushcart Prizes, and has been widely excerpted and anthologized in venues including Orion magazine, Uncommon Waters, Another Wilderness, Gifts of the Wild, Minnesota Seasons, A Different Angle, and more.

This stunning first collection by a widely anthologized, Pushcart prize-winning writer provides a beautifully written chronicle of outdoor life. With eloquence and honesty, Legler’s work documents a fascinating journey of self-discovery, graphically and intimately exploring the themes of hunting, sexuality, and landscape. Reading tour.
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