Kevin Holdsworth’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Creative Nonfiction, South Dakota Review and Denver University Law Review. He is currently at work on a book about his twenty years of part-time residence in Torrey. He teaches at Western Wyoming College and lives in Green River, Wyoming. For more information, please visit |
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Big Wonderful: Notes from Wyoming (U. P. Colorado, 2006) is a book about the Cowboy State, but it begins in Salt Lake City where author Kevin Holdsworth grew up. Holdsworth’s route to a home in Wyoming was circuitous and included way stations in New York City and Torrey, Utah. It also reversed the direction his ancestors had traveled from the Old World to the New. Holdsworth’s position as an insider/outsider in both Wyoming and Utah informs much of Big Wonderful. Of particular interest to Utahns are chapters on the handcart trek of his great-great grandmother, Emma Girdlestone, and the recent controversy at Martin’s Cove. He also takes a hard look the current drill-o-rama on BLM land in Wyoming, its social costs, and the environmental threats to his beloved Wind River Mountains. Dennis Lythgoe writes in the Deseret Morning News, “In this highly personal and very polished collection of essays and poems, Holdsworth has established a convincing presence as a Western writer with a future.”