Margie Winslow
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Margaret Winslow
Geologist, Professor, Author
THE BOOKS
Over My Head and The Cusp of Dreadfulness are available everywhere that books are sold, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Smartass will be available in 2018.
Over My Head: Journeys in Leaky Boats from the Strait of Magellan to Cape Horn and Beyond is a travel memoir that captures the misadventures of an inexperienced geologist as she begins pioneering field research in southern South America.
Making waves in two repressive cultures, the author was one of the first women to work in the male-dominated world of field geology and the only woman on US and Chilean ships working in Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica. The author’s voyages, beginning in the mid-1970’s, re-trace segments of Darwin’s and Magellan’s historic journeys into the uncharted fjords and trackless forests of Tierra del Fuego.
From the first scene, where she clings to a ledge alone as the tide rises over her boot tops, to her near-death experiences with killer whales, a collapsing glacier, and foundering ships, these experiences trace the author’s evolution from an ill-prepared beginner to a competent leader.
In search of the rocks and archaeological sites that might unravel Tierra del Fuego’s tortured natural and social history, the author finds that she must re-draw not only the primitive geologic map of the islands but is forced to follow her own inner compass to survive.
The Cusp of Dreadfulness is the sequel to Margaret Winslow’s award-winning travel adventure memoir, Over My Head. In it the author struggles for acceptance as a female field scientist while navigating through the wilderness of southern South America. Unlike her first book about sea voyages along the coasts during the 1970s, this memoir focuses on her land-based adventures between 1974 and 1998 carrying nothing more than her backpack, a hammer, and a compass. During fifteen seasons spread over thirty years, she recounts how she became lost while crossing the Andes on foot, was arrested and interrogated by the Argentine Navy, had a close brush with death on a flight over the Strait of Magellan, and rescued an injured child at an isolated farm. Her fascinating narrative includes the frightening details of an assault by a fisherman that hurled the previously intrepid traveler into a state of intense agoraphobia that she had to overcome if she was to survive and return to the wilderness.
The Cusp of Dreadfulness has just been named a finalist in the Foreword Reviews Indies competition.
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Coming out in the late summer of 2018. Our wonderful publisher is New World Library!
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SMART ASS: How a Donkey Challenged Me to Accept His True Nature and Rediscover My Own recounts my unexpected journey with Caleb, a 700-pound white Andalusian donkey, who wreaks havoc wherever he goes. It combines the humorous misadventures such as those found in Marley and Me with the sometimes poignant insights and difficult decisions Jon Katz faced in A Good Dog.
The memoir explores why an overworked college professor in New York adopted a donkey in mid-life – and how I swiftly found myself in over my head. The book chronicles my stormy attempts to tame Caleb and control his rebellious spirit. Acting as both mirror and foil, Caleb repeatedly confounds my expectations, humiliates me in public, and at one point, threatens my life. Yet in spite of it all, we form a bond that surprises me with its depth and meaning. In the end, my free-spirited donkey teaches me life-changing lessons and challenges me to keep faith with my own true nature.
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