Amanda Giracca

For a long time, Amanda Giracca led parallel lives. On one hand, she has been a field ornithologist, a landscape gardener,  a cow milker, and a National Forest trail crew worker. On the other hand, she’s been a freelance writer, an editor, and a somewhat-perpetual English graduate student. At long last her two halves are meeting: she writes about the environment, natural history, imagination and wilderness, travel, rural living, and class. She is currently a third-year MFA nonfiction student at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches Introduction to Journalism and Nonfiction. Her most recent nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming from Fourth Genre, Imagination & Place: Cartography (anthology), Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and Terrain.org. She has been an editor for the literary journals Passages North, Hot Metal Bridge, and Alligator Juniper, and awards include the George F. and Mary Ann McGunagle Memorial Award–a Nationality Room Scholarship of the University of Pittsburgh, Northern Michigan University’s Excellence in Education Research Grant, and the Boschen Fund for Artists Grant through the Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation. See a complete list of publications and select links at amandagiracca.com/publications. Contact her at AmandaGiracca AT yahoo.com.

Stories by Amanda:

• Yo Soy Perú

  The toucan lifts its lobster-claw bill into the sky over and over, releasing its whooping, loonish phrase like a persistent question. It wears a penguin’s tuxedo plumage, yet with flair—a yellow b..Read more

• Still Life in Ecuador

  Zaruma. Late morning. At his Abuelita’s house we ate cheese empanadas and overripe fruit, and we sat in chairs that lined either side of a hallway leading to the front b..Read more

• A Road Runs Through It

  I strain to see stars through the tropical haze and the pollution of the city. Moto taxis rattle over the nearby road, and Latin pop music laced with Incan pan pipes plays tinnily from a nearby stereo..Read more

• The Long Haul

  It’s late November in Mill River, which means the orange hunting hats are for sale again at the general store. You think it might be time to get yourself a new one. You wonder, when Dave sells the p..Read more

• Below the Surface

  The kid says he saw a fireball once. “Tell it Spanish so that everyone understands,” Abraham tells him, and the kid switches from Portuguese to Spanish, cupping his hands together over his head..Read more

• “God Bless Big Oil”: Field Notes from the Land of Industrial Tourism

  “You want to know why they always name a blast furnace after a woman?” asked a stout woman in dark sunglasses and a hardhat. “Because they’re hot, fiery, and temperamental.” A few in the ..Read more

• Summer People

  They arrive as the first dogwood trees are flowering. They trickle in at first, so few you don’t even notice. They come for the trees, the wide-open spaces, for the first hints of fresh spring air b..Read more

• Fear and Loneliness in Sublette County

  It was lonely at the top of Indian Pass. I should have been more excited to be at the apex of my hike, nearly 12,000 feet in elevation. In some ways, I felt lame that I wasn’t going any higher—I c..Read more

• A Non-Travel Essay

  One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as ..Read more

• A Road Runs Through It

  I strain to see stars through the tropical haze and the pollution of the city. Moto taxis rattle over the nearby road, and Latin pop music laced with Incan pan pipes plays tinnily from a nearby stereo..Read more

• Rekindled

  When I was nineteen, I burned down a small field of bamboo. It was one of the loneliest afternoons I can remember. I had been listening to a Cat Stevens record over and over, crying to myself, when a ..Read more