I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.
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December 1, 2025: CMarie Fuhrman
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When CMarie Fuhrman was a child living in Colorado, her parents built a bedroom on the patio so she “would stop sleeping in the grass beneath the clothesline,” but, she writes in her first essay in Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, “I have never been so deeply wild as in Idaho.”
I am in love with this Salmon River country. The steep slopes, wind-swept trees, the deer and elk—it’s where I feel most myself, most free. Yet the land holds a fierce beauty, a danger in its summer heat. Even those who share my love for it could crush my spirit with their conflicting desires.
The fourteen essays in Salmon Weather are personal narratives. “Walking the land, I have gotten to know who I am through what I stand for.” They are “women with nature” adventure stories. “We hike to abandoned mines, decommissioned fire lookouts, and forgotten ghost towns. We like to reimagine lives in these places.” CMarie is in conversation with the land, the river, the fish and snakes and fawns. She’s in relationship with everything that is out there.
Her stories feel alive. Describing deep snow, she writes
I almost wrote “buried instead of covered, but there is nothing dead about the scene. I like to think of the cold and white that covers the small trees as a quilt with a batting of winter that knows how to tuck a young pine in. I imagine what those saplings feel as the snow becomes their air and sky…
CMarie is not just telling us a story. As in the excerpt above, she’s allowing us to witness the making of the story, with the writer and story “ever-evolving,” shaping each other. And she invites the reader in.
But this bridge is not on the road that this story is interested in.
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And I keep coming back to the coyote because I work in metaphor. Symbol. I see patterns. I find story.
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I cross out what I have written…
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Stop for a moment and wonder at what you see.
In addition to an essayist, CMarie is a poet, and she brings a poet’s sensibility to the words she chooses and the rhythm of the sentences.
The trail, like the river, like the fish, pre-date white settlement, yet it was formed by human feet. It is kept up now by hooves and paws and on a day in late May, the tread of my own soles, following the tread of my partner, who has promised me wonder.
Salmon Weather is the second title in The Nature Series at DLJ Books published by Columbus State University Press. It was chosen as a Library of Congress “Great Reads from Great Places.”
CMarie is host of Colorado Public Radio’s “Terra Firma,” an award-winning columnist for the Inlander, the Associate Director of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, the founder of the Confluence Writing Community, and a former Idaho Writer in Residence. In addition to Salmon Weather, she is also the author of the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam and the co-editor of two anthologies: the multi-award-winning Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She is of Acoma Pueblo descent and a mix of European blood, and she lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho. This January she will teach at the Writing By Writers workshop, “Get the Lead Out.”
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Come back on DECEMBER 1st to read how CMARIE FURHMAN spends her days.
