Charlotte McGuinn Freeman is a writer located in Livingston, Montana. Her current newsletter project is called Getting Dirty: Material Entanglement in the Anthropocene. For decades, she’s been interested in how we talk about materiality, and how, for the most part, we try to hide it. Think of the words we use: dirty, gross, unpleasant, leaky. Think of the associations: primitive, female, instinctive, uncivilized. Getting Dirty is a space in which Charlotte is exploring how the ways we think about the material world intersect with how we think about bodies, about nature, and about wildness.
Charlotte’s previous blog project, from 2003-2023 was LivingSmall: The Subversive Power of Scaling Down.
Charlotte has an MA from UC Davis, where she was lucky enough to study with Gary Snyder and Elizabeth Tallent, and a PhD from the University of Utah. She was involved for many years with the late lamented, Art of the Wild Writer’s Conference at Olympic Valley in California.
In 2000, Picador USA published Charlotte’s novel, Place Last Seen. It was reviewed in the New York Times, and was a San Francisco Chronicle top ten selection. Since the early 2000s, Charlotte has been concentrating on nonfiction, and has been published in Dark Mountain, Terrain, Big Sky Journal, Montana Quarterly and other venues. She had an essay included in the 2010 edition of Best Food Writing. She was also the cookbook reviewer at Bookslut for a number of years.
She is currently working on a memoir: Wilderness of Bones, and a collection of essays, Material World.