Elise Atchison Home

Biography

Elise Atchison has lived most of her life in an off-the-grid home on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in Montana. She received a B.A. in English/Writing from Montana State University. Much of her work focuses on the changing western landscape and how those changes affect the land and the people who live there. She is interested in exploring the many ways we relate to the natural world, the many ways we relate to each other, and how the two are fundamentally intertwined.

Elise is the author of Crazy Mountain and the recipient of the High Plains Book Award, Montana Arts Council Artist Grant, Eludia Book Award, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Artist Grant, and she has been a finalist for many other awards. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, radio, and elsewhere.

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“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.”

Annie Dillard