Bearlodge Writers

Renee Carrier

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"I write to try to understand the natural world and to engage mystery. I find teachers everywhere. Writing is about discovering glories and waking up in darkness, filtered through experience and sensibility."

Renee Carrier Bio

Renee Carrier was born in Washington D.C., raised on Air Force bases and in France. In 1971 she moved from Georgia to Wyoming to attend the University where she earned a degree in French.

She has worked as a stable hand, riding instructor, carpenter's helper, sales clerk, proof reader, waitress, singer/guitarist/fiddler, teacher, substitute teacher, GED examiner and began writing seriously in 1990. Renee and her husband, a retired school superintendent, live in rural northern Crook County, Wyoming, near Devils Tower, where they tend an orchard, two gardens, and a small vineyard.

Depending on the season, Renee enjoys riding, knitting, reading, traveling, making music and laughing with friends and family.

 A nonfiction title, A Singular Notion, is Renee's first collection of essays, and she is currently editing her late father's manuscript on his early aviation career and experiences.

Publication Credits

"Crossfire"--short story in Caldera, 1994
Rewrite of Devils Tower National Monument Climbing Handbook, co-authors Dick Guilmette and Steve Gardiner, Devils Tower Natural History Association, 1995
"Of a Wedding and Wagons"--essay in Wyoming Magazine, 1998
"Tender Presence"--essay in Sacred Journey, 1999
"Winter Into Spring"--guest column, The Sundance Times, 1999,
"Tender Presence"--excerpt in Spirit and Life, 2000
"Living Stones"--article in The Wyoming Catholic Register, 2004
The Owen Wister Review, the University of Wyoming, 2005
In the Shadow of the Bearlodge, Writings from the Black Hills, anthology Many Kites Press, 2006
A Singular Notion, literary nonfiction, Pronghorn Press, 2006

Writing Excerpt

Foreword to A Singular Notion

In 1957 my father was assigned to NATO in France, where he served four years with the Allied Air Forces of central Europe. I was four years old. Another language beyond English or French informed my days, a kind of relating initiated—I have come to believe—by a visit to a certain rock in the forest of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris. I later rediscovered this boulder, Le Rocher d’Hercule, in a letter written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, wherein he described a visit to the site, and had learned that it was important to the Druids. Today the boulder is popular with climbers, as is another great stone in northeast Wyoming, Devils Tower, one which American Indians venerate as wakan, or holy. This rock too begs a response—recognition—that we are no more, nor less, than the stones, that we merely express ourselves differently, that everything vibrates with that which we call “spirit,” and ultimately, that we as humans are responsible, or “able to respond.” This remains our greatest capacity and inclination.

There being many ways of knowing, and different values placed on different styles thereof, I set out to describe a less-valued, but nonetheless indispensable kind of “knowing,” one less apparent in our present culture, but not necessarily ignored by those heart—given one’s circumstances. Its communication is not expressed in words, but rather in the proverbial “signs, wonders and portents.” This kind of perceiving proceeds from attentiveness, and given our humanity, too often through its tragic opposite—thoughtless carelessness and disregard.

The following essays and notes evolved over the course of seventeen years, in an whom Kirkpatrick Sale calls “dwellers in the land,” whether geographically or in one’s effort to acknowledge my notions, whether deduced from the usual “signs and portents,” or gleaned from fellow wonderers and travelers. As a species, we seem to require contexts lest we become lost in life’s twists and turns; Truth, Beauty, Awe, Grace and Reverence inhabit this “divine milieu” as sign posts for me, to borrow Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s sublime expression for context.

A reminiscence of childhood anchors the theme of interconnectedness—love by any other name—between ourselves and this planet’s ground of being, where spirit and matter mingles, for me now, in this state of Wyoming. Alchemical and practical magic, weddings and wagons, monasteries and one-room cabins, forests and churches, painters and pragmatists; unconsciousness, consequence, mistakes, atonement, sacrifice and restoration—contrasts holding a tension that somehow manage to bear up under the weight of the contradictions, but still I wonder and dare ask, isn’t it more grand to be far out on the very end of the see-saw, legs and arms all flying akimbo, resurrected in a wild response to the equal but opposite motion?

Excerpt from A Singular Notion released October 2006.