As a student and teacher of history, Robin Foster is well aware that humans have persisted through major hardships as long as they have existed. When faced with the anxious dread many felt at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Foster began seeking stories of tenacious women of the American West who had survived their own hardships in a world that threw the unexpected at them. During one of the most uncertain periods of her life, Foster hit the road, embarking on a journey to find these determined women of the past and finding herself along the way. Grit and Ghosts tells the stories of eight women who speak to a shared human experience of struggle, and the grit required to move through it.

Landscape and memory become deeply intertwined throughout Grit and Ghosts as Foster wanders through park ranger Marguerite Lindsley’s Yellowstone, through Mexican faith healer Teresa Urrea’s Sonoran Desert, and through author Gertrude Stein’s deeply altered Oakland. Part excavation, part resurrection, Grit and Ghosts is permeated with the individual and collective memories of Foster and her subjects, like ghosts of history.

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