The Cusp of Dreadfulness

The Cusp of Dreadfulness is the sequel to Margaret Winslow’s award-winning travel adventure memoir, Over My Head. It recounts the author’s struggles for acceptance as a female field scientist while navigating through the wilderness of southern South America. Unlike her first book about sea voyages along the coasts during the 1970s, this memoir focuses on her land-based adventures between 1974 and 1998 carrying nothing more than her backpack, a hammer, and a compass. During fifteen seasons spread over thirty years, she becomes lost while crossing the Andes on foot, is arrested and interrogated by the Argentine Navy, has a close brush with death on a flight over the Strait of Magellan, and helps rescue an injured child at an isolated farm.

This fascinating narrative includes the frightening details of an assault by a fisherman that hurls the previously intrepid traveler into a state of intense agoraphobia that she must overcome if she is to survive and return to the wilderness.

The Cusp of Dreadfulness was named a finalist in the 2016-7 Foreword Reviews Indies competition.

“Travel memoirs to exotic regions infrequently feature women as protagonists, rarely combine laugh-out-loud misadventures with insights about the pioneering efforts of women to enter the almost exclusively male branches of field sciences.”
—Palisades Free Library Newsletter

“The Cusp of Dreadfulness is like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, but set in a dictatorship located at the tip of South America during the turbulent 1970’s through 1990’s.”
—Publisher’s press release.