Erin Saldin
Erin Saldin has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo, West Africa and a bartender in New York City, and holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in fiction. She has been awarded the Rrofihe Trophy in Fiction, and her work has been selected for The Best New American Voices 2009. In 2010, she was awarded PEN/Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Residency, and spent six months living off the grid in the Klamath mountains of Oregon. Her short stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in Fivechapters, Open City, The New York Times, The Best New American Voices, The Northwest Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Her debut novel for young adults, The Girls of No Return, was published in February, 2012 by Arthur Levine/Scholastic Books.
Erin lives in Missoula, Montana, where she teaches at the University of Montana.
“Don't be afraid to explore the shadows. You might find some hope within the hurt.”
“Here are the basic rules of LNTC, as I understood it:Leave no evidence that you ever left the comfort of your bed to struggle through the woods with the sole intention of eating starch and beans and lying on your back on a rocky and downward-sloping campsite while you stare at the ceiling of your tent and listen to the sounds of a variety of carnivores as they rustle around outside. Leave no evidence that you are scared witless, that every movement terrifies you, even the most quiet scratching that you will realize in the morning must have been chipmunks. Leave no evidence that you are afraid you didn't dig your glory hole deep enough and that you used twice as much toilet paper as everyone else. Leave as little evidence as possible to indicate that you are the most incompetent camper to ever set foot on the trail.Needless to say, it was my first time camping.”
“Some people take after their parents. Some people are reactions to their parents. I think you and I are in the second group.”
“Tara...seemed to digest gossip as voraciously as an owl, regurgitating it in the form of little pellets of dubious information.”
“...They called the lake Bob. Don't ask me why. "Gonna go sit by Bob," someone would say, or "Bob looks like hell this morning.”