Bové, Jennifer 1973-

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Bové, Jennifer 1973-

PERSONAL:

Born 1973; married; husband's name Chris; children: two daughters and a son. Education: Attended University of Missouri, B.A., 1996. Hobbies and other interests: Canoeing, hiking, and fishing.

ADDRESSES:

Home—WA.

CAREER:

Writer. Formerly worked as a field biologist.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, collector, and contributor) The Back Road to Crazy: Stories from the Field (anthology), University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 2005.

(Editor) A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild (anthology), Solas House (Palo Alto, CA), 2006.

Contributor to anthologies, including Heart Shots, edited by Mary Zeiss-Stange; contributor to periodicals, including Bugle: Journal of Elk Country and the Hunt, Missouri Conservationist, Wild Outdoor World, Your Big Backyard, and Women in Natural Resources. Author of the blogs A View from My Boots and Jennifer Bove's Amazon Blog.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jennifer Bové grew up in Missouri and Colorado and worked for several years as a field biologist with her husband. She is also the editor of two books that focus on the outdoors. Bové is the editor of The Back Road to Crazy: Stories from the Field, which features thirty-eight essays contributed by field biologists concerning anecdotes about their conservation fieldwork worldwide. Bové solicited the contribu- tions after working five years in the field herself and realizing that her own experiences were matched or surpassed by those of numerous other field biologists around the world. Having often asked herself why she was doing the work she was doing, she asked various field biologists to answer the same question in their essays.

The anecdotes in The Back Road to Crazy range from humorous to tragic and feature how ecological ideals can sometimes lead people into extreme situations. Stories include tales of deadly snakebites, an encounter with a plague of marmots, special delivery skunk oil, capturing bald eagles, and a tale about a mountain goat that gets loose in the galley of a research ship. Working on the frontlines of wildlife studies, botany, and resource management, the anthology's contributors tell of their experiences from the Midwest to Myanmar. Diverse in both subject matter and style, the essays focus on the intricacies of biological fieldwork in an honest and informative manner.

In addition to writing the introduction, the author also contributes an essay titled "Running the Wind." The story describes the author's duties on the Wind River in the Pacific Northwest as she works on a survey project of Steelhead fish. In her essay, the author writes: "Within ten feet of the far canyon wall, I stopped struggling against the current and turned to face downstream, giving the team a quick wave, and then I stretched my arms straight out in front of me and lay my face into the icy water, suddenly alone in the cavernous beauty of the pool. It was quiet and ethereal, and I floated effortlessly in the buoyant neoprene wetsuit as if gravity had set me free. Soaring some thirty feet above the floor of the clear blue pool, I remember thinking this must be what heaven is like. I was an angel on the wing." Commenting that The Back Road to Crazy features "the blunders and wonders of field work," E contributor Jennifer Veilleux also wrote in the same review that the essays focus on "the extraordinary nature of the field work."

A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild is another anthology edited by Bové and features essays by thirty women contributors who work in a variety of outdoor professions, from smoke jumping and river running to professional falconry and horse packing. The stories vary from rescuing sea turtles on a nude beach in Hawaii to driving cattle across Texas. In another tale, a contributor tells of her role in tracking a pair of fugitive Montana mountain men. In her introduction to the book, the author notes: "I set out to assemble an unprecedented anthology of writing by modern women who have abandoned the bounds of society to earn a living in a wide spectrum of outdoor professions and who could attest, in their own words, to their proclivity for wild work." Bové went on to write in her introduction: "My criteria for submissions were unrestricted, leaving room for interpretation by women in every imaginable wilderness-oriented occupation—the wilder and more remote, the better. I encouraged lively, engaging tales that revealed something about a woman's relationship to wilderness within the context of her job."

In a review of A Mile in Her Boots, a contributor to the Web site On Being a Scientist and a Woman wrote: "The stories are evocative, funny, familiar, and exciting." The reviewer went on to note in the same review that "all the essays are written in engaging story-telling voice, drawing the reader into the authors' sense of excitement, fear, or joy."