Kelly Coughlin works in Wildland Fire management at Mesa Verde National Park, in Southwest Colorado. Her environmentally focused essays, short stories, and op-eds have been published in Willamette Week, Five Minutes, Oregon Environmental Coalition online, and VoiceCatcher. She is working on a memoir about being a woman becoming a wildland firefighter during the male-dominated 1990s and early 2000s.
At first, sobriety feels at once like a death of a best friend, loss of comfort, and a beloved version of one’s self. On some level, it is exactly these things . . .