Originally published on 49 Writers
Truman Capote said, “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the yard and shot it.” Maybe that’s a little dramatic. John Steinbeck said, “The book dies a real death for me when I write the last word. I have a little sorrow and then go on to a new book which is alive. The rows of my books on the shelf are to me like very well embalmed corpses. They are neither alive nor mine. I have no sorrow for them because I have forgotten them, forgotten in its truest sense.”
I got a taste of that “little sorrow” when I turned in my MFA thesis this year. It wasn’t even a book yet, just a book-length collection of essays, and still, hitting send felt kind of awful. It meant the end of mentor comments, summer residencies, school-imposed deadlines, the end of a nurturing community that had given me a glimpse into the writing life. Read More »
I live just north of Hawaii on another island in the Pacific—Kodiak Island—in the Gulf of Alaska. For a small town, we send a disproportionately large number of tourists to Hawaii every year. Everyone here can think of some neighbor who finally up and moved there permanently. They say Hawaiians have two seasons, rainy and dry, and we too have two seasons, stormy and less stormy, which may be what sends so many of us to the our sister archipelago.
Actually, there is one spot on Kauai that can beat our 70 inches of rain a year. It’s Mt. Waialeale, with an average rainfall of 426 inches (up to 40 feet). It’s one of the wettest spots on earth. No one lives there. Read More »
This essay with accompanying photographs and audio recording are available at Terrain.org It has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Originally published in The Anchorage Daily News
On a recent gray, rainy day at our fish site on Kodiak, my husband carried the mail up from the skiff. Inside a slightly soggy envelope from my mom was a present, Stacy Studebakers’ field guide, “Wildflowers and other Plant Life of the Kodiak Archipelago” (Sense of Place Press, $25).
The book is the first comprehensive field guide for this region of Alaska. Read More »
Originally published in The Anchorage Daily News
In Kodiak, snowstorms usually make winter’s arrival hard to ignore. It’s a subtler shift from spring to summer. Except for this year, when May blazed in with several weeks of sunshine.
Within days there was green everywhere. It started along the edge of the road, budded on alders and salmonberry bushes that were soon waving starry pink blossoms, and crept up the mountains toward shrinking patches of snow. Even the birds passing through to breeding grounds on the mainland seemed to extend their stay, puttering like vacationers around the beaches at Women’s Bay. Read More »
Originally published in The Anchorage Daily News
We traveled to Bolivia in March and while we were gone there were several uncommon visitors to Kodiak Island. We missed seeing an elephant seal at a beach right in town and trumpeter swans at Lake Rose Tead.
I heard about the swans in an email from the instructor of a birding class offered through Kodiak College this spring. I’d signed up for the course in spite of my fear that I might not like standing for hours in the cold peering through binoculars. I wanted to learn to identify some of the 240 species of birds found on the Kodiak Archipelago. Read More »
Originally published in The Anchorage Daily News
Our son’s favorite book is Blueberries for Sal, a story about a mother and daughter and a sow and cub berry picking on the same hill. I don’t think Liam connects the bears in the story to the bears we live with all summer; I think he just loves blueberries. When we read the story each evening, I think of our cabin sitting empty in Uyak Bay. Kodiak brown bears will soon emerge from their dens, and I hope our electric fence is still up and functioning.
Not many people outside Alaska have to worry about maulings or their house being damaged by a creature twice the size of Sasquatch. Our fish site is in bear territory, and the best we can do is to live carefully and hope the bears steer clear of our cabin those months we’re away. Read More »
