A Personal Chronicle of California’s Wildfire Crisis

KPFA - Terra Verde

On this week’s Terra Verde episode, host and producer Hannah Wilton interviews author Manjula Martin about her recently-published memoir, The Last Fire Season; A Personal and Pyronatural History, out now from Pantheon Books. Set during the catastrophic 2020 wildfire season and the compounding crises of the pandemic and political upheaval, Martin tells the story of evacuating from her home in West Sonoma County and her journey of healing from a personal health crisis. Tracing the contours of hope, healing, and despair, The Last Fire Season explores what it means to live on a dynamic, changing planet and how we might shift our relationship to the keystone process of fire.

Manjula Martin is coauthor, with her father, Orin Martin, of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Cut, Pacific Standard, Modern Farmer, and Hazlitt. She edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living; was managing editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story; and has worked in varied editorial capacities in the nonprofit and publishing sectors. She lives in West Sonoma County, California.

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