Overview

As a student and teacher of history, Robin Foster is well aware that humans have persisted through major hardships as long as they have existed. When faced with the anxious dread many felt at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Foster began seeking stories of tenacious women of the American West who had survived their own hardships in a world that threw the unexpected at them. During one of the most uncertain periods of her life, Foster hit the road, embarking on a journey to find these determined women of the past and finding herself along the way. Grit and Ghosts tells the stories of eight women who speak to a shared human experience of struggle, and the grit required to move through it. Landscape and memory become deeply intertwined throughout Grit and Ghosts as Foster wanders through park ranger Marguerite Lindsley’s Yellowstone, through Mexican faith healer Teresa Urrea’s Sonoran Desert, and through author Gertrude Stein’s deeply altered Oakland. Part excavation, part resurrection, Grit and Ghosts is permeated with the individual and collective memories of Foster and her subjects, like ghosts of history.  

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9781496238467

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Reviews

""Foster's subjects are interesting in their own right . . . and well worth reading about.""—Kirkus Reviews “Grit and Ghosts looks outward and inward: at the marks its eight women have left on the world and the marks the world leaves on women who dream big. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book illuminates stories that deserve to be told.”—Gwen Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories “Grit and Ghosts is for anyone who presses against the boundaries of their lives. With impressive depth, Robin Foster uncovers amazing details about her subjects’ lives as she weaves together unforgettable stories of bravery, risk, and passion.”—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else “Forging exhumations into persons and places, Robin Foster is an essayist who knows, truly, that only in going do we come to know. Grit and Ghosts is a beautiful reliquary of deep mysterious springs and the souls they once homed.”—Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“Grit and Ghosts looks outward and inward: at the marks its eight women have left on the world and the marks the world leaves on women who dream big. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book illuminates stories that deserve to be told.”—Gwen Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories “Grit and Ghosts is for anyone who presses against the boundaries of their lives. With impressive depth, Robin Foster uncovers amazing details about her subjects’ lives as she weaves together unforgettable stories of bravery, risk, and passion.”—Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else “Forging exhumations into persons and places, Robin Foster is an essayist who knows, truly, that only in going do we come to know. Grit and Ghosts is a beautiful reliquary of deep mysterious springs and the souls they once homed.”—Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

Author Information

Robin Foster is a public historian and creative writer. She is the author of Carl Van Doren: A Man of Ideas and The Age of Sail in the Age of Aquarius: The South Street Seaport and the Crisis of the Sixties.

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