Welcome to our second episode with women and non-binary firefighters who have written books about their experiences working both in fire and on hotshot crews more specifically. Our guest for this episode is HOTSHOT author River Selby (they/them), who spent seven years as a wildland firefighter—four of which were as a hotshot—from 2000 to 2010. They've since gotten their undergrad and MFA (in fiction) at Syracuse, and are currently working towards a PhD in Nonfiction with an emphasis in postcolonial histories, North American colonization, and postmodern literature and culture. This unique background has River to create a phenomenally in-depth book that covers not only their own experiences of working on crews—experiences that helped them heal from traumatic childhood and teenage experiences, while bringing their own challenges and traumas. Between these personal vignettes of life on the life, River paints a rich history of how fire suppression and colonization in the Western US (and elsewhere!) have set the stage for our modern relationship with fire. They were just 19 when they got their first fire job, on a contract crew in Oregon. They'd found their way into fire after years of deep instability, with childhood traumas manifesting as addiction, homelessness and violence when they were a teenager. Fire proved to provide both distraction and an unexpected stability compared to their previous reality, but brought with it its own challenges and traumatic experiences—sexual