Craig Childs is an author, performer, traveler, and science writer. He received his minor in Women's Studies from the University of Colorado, along with a less useful but appreciated major in Journalism. His masters degree is in Desert Studies from Prescott College, Arizona, where he remains the only student to have received that particular degree. He has written more than a dozen books in the walker writer tradition, his style narrative, the topics scientific and adventurous. He currently lives outside of Norwood.
Hometown, current town, and how you came to live there?
I was born in Tempe, Arizona, near the dry bed of the Salt River. I keep going back there, event though it's one of the hearts of the hellhole of Phoenix. I haven't lived in Tempe since I was a toddler, but for the last two decades it's been a research focus of mine, where I've been studying the Hohokam civilization that preceded Tempe by several hundred years. Now I'm living in Norwood, which is the next stop on a regional migration that started around 1990: Ouray to Ridgway to Crawford To Hotchkiss to Norwood.
Writing style?
Chaos to order, in that order.
Favorite way to relax after a long day?
Going home, standing outside and looking into a dusk canyon, nothing on my mind but crickets.
Most productive time of day?
When I'm writing.
What do you love about Telluride and what do you wish you could change?
Being nostalgic, I'd like it if we were back about 20 years ago dancing at Fly me to the Moon with a girl on a bass guitar wearing nothing above her waist but a pair of sunflowers, living in a tipi out in the woods, working for crap pay and loving it. But we all get older, don't we?
Favorite ice cream flavor?
I'm sorry, all of them. I'll even choke down bubble gum flavor. It's a problem.
What is something your mother taught you?
When a giant barking dog comes at you, don't run. She ran. I stood there wide eyed and shocked, probably about 8 years old, and the dog stopped, too. That's how she taught me not to run. A few years ago she joined me on a research project on an island in the Bering Sea. She'd walk with me in hard summer rains where it felt like winter. When the seas winds blew too hard across the tundra, we climbed into old hunting blinds the Yup'iks had stacked up with lava rocks. She'd curl up and make a nest of herself on the ground, out of the wind. That's what she taught me. How to be wherever I am, no matter how rocky or how windy. May I add one more? I could go on about my mom forever! When I was a kid, she'd make me eat Sundaymorning pancakes outside in a snowstorm, and she'd eat hers right along with me. Without ever trying, she taught me there is no happier place than outside.
Last time you had a good laugh?
When you asked what I learned from my mother.
Favorite project you've completed?
The book that I just finished two years late, five years of research, travel, and writing on Ice Age North America. I love the thing, and will be glad never to work on it again.