front cover of The Big Bang Symphony
The Big Bang Symphony
A Novel of Antarctica
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Antarctica is a vortex that draws you back, season after season. The place is so raw and pure, all seal hide and crystalline iceberg. The fishbowl communities at McMurdo Station, South Pole Station, and in the remote field camps intensify relationships, jack all emotion up to a 10. The trick is to get what you need and then get out fast.
    At least that’s how thirty-year-old Rosie Moore views it as she flies in for her third season on the Ice. She plans to avoid all entanglements, romantic and otherwise, and do her work as a galley cook. But when her flight crash-lands, so do all her plans.
    Mikala Wilbo, a brilliant young composer whose heart—and music—have been frozen since the death of her partner, is also on that flight. She has come to the Ice as an artist-in-residence, to write music, but also to secretly check out the astrophysicist father she has never met.
    Arriving a few weeks later, Alice Neilson, a graduate student in geology who thinks in charts and equations, is thrilled to leave her dependent mother and begin her career at last. But from the start she is aware that her post-doc advisor, with whom she will work in Antarctica, expects much more from their relationship.
    As the three women become increasingly involved in each other’s lives, they find themselves deeply transformed by their time on the Ice. Each falls in love. Each faces challenges she never thought she would meet. And ultimately, each finds redemption in a depth and quality of friendship that only the harsh beauty of Antarctica can engender.
 
 
Finalist, Lambda Literary Awards
 
Finalist, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, awarded by the Publishing Triangle
 
Finalist, Northern California Independent Booksellers Association
 
Honorable Mention, Foreword Magazine’s Gay/Lesbian Fiction Book of the Year
 
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
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front cover of The Ice Cave
The Ice Cave
A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
For Lucy Jane Bledsoe, wilderness had always been a source of peace. But during one disastrous solo trip in the wintry High Sierra she came face to face with a crisis: the wilderness no longer felt like home. The Ice Cave recounts Bledsoe’s wilderness journeys as she recovers her connection with the wild and discovers the meanings of fear and grace. 

These are Bledsoe’s gripping tales of fending off wolves in Alaska, encountering UFOs in the Colorado Desert, and searching for mountain lions in Berkeley. Her memorable story “The Breath of Seals” takes readers to Antarctica, the wildest continent on earth, where she camped out with geologists, biologists, and astrophysicists. These fresh and deeply personal narratives remind us what it means to be simply one member of one species, trying to find food and shelter—and moments of grace—on our planet.
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front cover of Lava Falls
Lava Falls
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Scrabbling for ways to believe in themselves and the world, the spirited, heart-driven people who populate these stories find surprising pockets of hope. A woman returns to the Alaskan cabin of her survivalist childhood, full of misgivings and memories. A trip to Yellowstone sparks a crisis for a man who feels kinship with the wolves he glimpses there. Nursing painful pasts, sisters take a cruise together to Antarctica. A runaway finds salvation from violence in her own singing. And in the title novella, a Grand Canyon rafting expedition profoundly changes the lives of six women.

Refusing to buckle under the pressures of family and political traumas, the sojourners in this collection are unified by themes of creative expression and of love—how we define it, how we are impelled by it, and how we are lifted by it.
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front cover of A Thin Bright Line
A Thin Bright Line
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
At the height of the Cold War, Lucybelle Bledsoe is offered a job seemingly too good to pass up. However, there are risks. Her scientific knowledge and editorial skills are unparalleled, but her personal life might not withstand government scrutiny.
            Leaving behind the wreckage of a relationship, Lucybelle finds solace in working for the visionary scientist who is extracting the first-ever polar ice cores. The lucidity of ice is calming and beautiful. But the joyful pangs of a new love clash with the impossible compromises of queer life. If exposed, she could lose everything she holds dear.
            Based on the hidden life of the author’s aunt and namesake, A Thin Bright Line is a love story set amid Cold War intrigue, the origins of climate research, and the nascent civil rights movement. Poignant, brilliant, and moving, it reminds us to act on what we love, not just wish for it.

"It triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances."—New York Times Book Review

“Bledsoe covers a lot of ground here, imagining her intellectual aunt’s relationship to the queer cultural transformations of the 1950s, as well as the paranoia of the Cold War era.”—San Francisco Chronicle
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