BY SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER

Transplanted in the rich ground of Idaho and with a winding path like an unbroken river behind her, CMarie Fuhrman has arrived at an understanding of what it means to be a writer: “to bear witness, to share stories, to reveal the raw and tender truths.” She asserts such in her latest collection of essays, Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, published in March. The essays in Salmon Weather are Fuhrman’s “markers on a growth chart, cairns along a winding path, monuments to the person” she is now. Among the collection of lyrical prose are earnest reckonings with personal loss, the impending and active loss of nature, the ethics of hunting, and the ever-present questions of identity and belonging.

Fuhrman earned her MFA in Poetry at the University of Idaho and now serves as the director of the annual Elk River Writer’s Workshop in Pray, Montana. She is also an associate director of Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. Her name adorns many notable covers, including as the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and as co-editor of two anthologies, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She hosts Terra Firma, a podcast from Colorado Public Radio, and has published poetry and nonfiction in many journals and anthologies.

Fuhrman is of Acoma Pueblo and European-American ancestry. Adopted as an infant and raised with an adopted sister of nearly the same age, she sprouted upon Colorado’s Front Range within a homesteading European-American family. As a child, her scraped knees turned to tough skin, and she was called names in elementary school. As an adult, she deepened her allegiance to the multifaceted nature of her Native identity despite having been taunted as a child.

Adulthood led her to Red Lodge, Montana, where she lived with her husband Randy until his death in a kayaking accident. She weathered throughout the West until new love and impulse brought her to McCall, Idaho. Remarkably, she notes, “the coincidence of Idaho’s abbreviation: ID. Identity,” is where she has fully developed hers. Fuhrman has lived there with her partner Caleb—a fish biologist—and their dogs in an A-frame cabin near various bodies of water that carve through her life.

Along the winding Salmon River, she’s had many mentors: people, other-than-human relatives, and the land. Like Aldo Leopold’s “Go Lite” theory, she has learned to “go lightly,” to tread literally and deliberately without causing harm. Fuhrman explains that Salmon Weather refers to rain that cascades from ridgelines, flows to creeks and then rushes within the river near her home. This deluge brings enough depth for Chinook and Kokanee to swim upstream where they spawn in tributaries. They release eggs that will be fertilized in pebbled beds to germinate and fledge into hatchlings before eventually flowing downstream, finger-sized.

Her book of the same name explores her own patterned “continuation of life.” Tragedy releases to slow recovery. Impulse-driven desire leads to love. Fuhrman holds the land’s beauty throughout each of her life’s stages “in order to believe in something as difficult as hope.” This is the grace she gives herself so she can go on living, recognizing her mistakes, questioning her choices and making
new stories.

In Salmon Weather, Fuhrman continues to return as a witness to her own past. She echoes poet Walt Whitman, saying “I contain multitudes.” She is both a hunter and a giver. She is an abandoned child and lover. She is a found woman building strength in her own identity upon the buckskin-colored earth and beneath the clear blue skies.

True to her reputation for weaving stories to connect with the wild, Fuhrman “depends on wilderness to power [her] imagination.” The art of the natural world ignites her emotions and sparks her writing. Salmon Weather is Fuhrman’s wisdom on the page. She hopes it may be “something of value. Something useful. To not be forgotten. Something that someone might uncover with an oh and remember what it feels like to be filled with wonder.” In the face of Salmon Weather that spills rain down ridgelines, toward streams, she hopes her written lines may be the banks of a river that hold fast and true.

Poet, educator, and advocate Shelli Rottschafer (she/her/ ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in Latin American Contemporary Literature (2005). From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught Spanish at a small liberal arts college in Michigan. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry from Western Colorado University (2025). Shelli resides in Louisville, Colorado & El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, Daniel Combs, and their Pyrenees-border collie rescue pup.