River of Play

Alaska and Punctuated Migration

I'll start by mentioning my recent--was it a week-and-a-half ago already?--reading for the UAF Midnight Sun Visiting Writer Series. The craft talk (Like an Off-Tempo Waltz: Writers and Editors) went well. Dinner at one of the local Thai restaurants was tasty. And the reading was well-attended enough that they had to add extra rows for the audience. It helped immensely that the other guy reading is the new Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. And it doesn't hurt that darkness comes early.

The reading reminded me of one of the core tensions for any place-based ecopoet: how do you start writing again after a move?

I read from my "Boomtown" manuscript, and several audience members talked to me afterward about their love of the midwest and Great Plains, and the difficulty they experienced expressing that affection--that identity--with people outside the region. Their reactions (and prepping for the reading) have helped me return to the manuscript with renewed energy. But with two sobering changes. First, I've had the feeling--and then the actual wording--that a book so closely focused on a town that is in flyover country won't garner any publisher interest. So I've had to scrub out some of the tight focus and reference. I'm deeply ambivalent about this shift. Second, I've moved to a new place.

That move really drives a deep engagement with a topic I've wrestled with, written about, and knew I had to face again: punctuated migration. I'm not one of the dirt elite (those lucky few who managed to live on the same land as their ancestors--and not as sharecroppers, freedmen (and women), or other marginalized population), and I live in the most mobile era of human existence, so I'm pretty much guaranteed not to spend my life in one place. So, as I've already mentioned: how to start writing again in this place?

The natural drama, aesthetic appeal, charismatic megafauna, ragged edge of civilization components don't help. It seems too easy, almost, like you could get lazy writing in a place like this with its fjords, granite ranges, polar bears, dog sleds, profound winters, northern lights... Zounds! What's not to love? And yet, that kind of surface can be blinding--and I'm of course most interested in the metaphorical way it can be blinding. Having grown up in an area of great physical beauty, and a concomitant tourist industry, I'm suspicious of surfaces. 

The dilemma then is that I very much want to get writing, but I don't trust my first reading, my first engagement (foxes and beavers on the way to work, black bears on the trail along the backyards, moose closing off lanes of traffic!). The great thing about my job is that a lot of research comes to me, so I'm learning a lot about the place quickly. As you might expect from a place so large, though, the diversity of climate and peoples is--well, it's as stark in its diversity as any chunk of land that you can separate into distinct regions. Barrow and Ketchikan both have water right next to the town, but they might as well be on different worlds (compare their weather forecasts, for starters).

And I'm on a different planet, entirely, here in the interior. So I wait. I listen. I try to get people to talk to me (not hard to do in my job). I start to think about travel, space, light, the choices any of us might make to come up here. 

There's poetry in that. 

North to NewPages.com

After a sustained three months of madness and abused endurance, we are finally (mostly) settled in  Fairbanks, AK. I am reminded of our extraordinary setting every morning as I head away from the Ray Mountains, push up the steep incline of the bike path to join up with the Johansen Freeway as it passes over the train depot, and look to see if I can spot the Alaska Range. On a clear day, I can see Denali. And that’s a good omen for us all.

I’m not sure where to begin. The excitement and rush around the job posting, interview, and offer negotiation? The six day drive up through Canada to the Alaska Highway and on to Fairbanks? The blow out about three hours into the trip? Or getting settled in with our boxes and boxes of stuff (no outright breakage but plenty of ding-n-dent)? As I said, hard to know. 

Right now, the girl’s asleep, Dana’s knitting, and I’m thinking about near-arctic living.

Near arctic? Yes. So an all-wheel-drive car with complete winterizing kit (sure, a block heater, but also a battery heater, and advice to get a thermal-rated extension cord). Long thinking jags about over-mittens and snowshoes, about uninsulated storage and about snow up to my shoulder.

And near to the end of the world. All the big department stores (and many others) around here do bush flight deliveries. Tourists zoom by packed in cruiser-weight buses from one scenic drive to the other. I’d guess they’re doing a loop from, say, Homer along the Wrangell-St. Elias mountains, across the eastern edge or the Alaska range, up to Fairbanks, and then back down through the Alaska range, past Denali, and down to Anchorage. I assume they’re hoping to see caribou (done it), moose (seen many), bison (somehow larger and shaggier up here), bears (yes to both black and grizzly), and other charismatic fauna.

I’ll be honest: I don’t blame them. 

There’s more to say, of course, but I’ll end this brief post with a note about something that surprised me: smell. The air smells different. Almost like incense. More balsam than pine, more dry than the leaf mold smell of eastern forests. Definitely worth the drive.

Ah, and I missed something when I drove up here: I had an interview on NewPages.com. Go read it!

 

Turn of the Seasons

The last two months have been moving too fast for me to keep any sort of posting up to date. During the first week of April, the University of Alaska Press posted a job listing for a new acquisitions editor. I was encouraged by friends, colleagues, and mentors to apply--the job certainly sounded good to me--so pulled my resume and application letter together and entered the market. 

A week after the job closed, I got a call to schedule an interview. The next week.

After a harried weekend studying the U of Alaska Press, I interviewed. I thought it went pretty well, and  week later I got an email asking to schedule a call to talk about the job.

By the end of the week, we had reached a deal. I think that was the sixth of May. We decided that June 13 would be a good start date, so we've been running around like possessed people trying to extract ourselves from Lincoln and find a way to insert ourselves into Fairbanks, AK. We've been 
busy lining up housing, and I've been training my replacement at the magazine.

A week from today, I roll out of Lincoln and head north through the Dakotas before tacking northwest across Canada and on into Alaska.

We're looking forward to learning about this new, and very different, landscape. And... Well, just about everything. We'd be more excited if we weren't so frantic.

And right now, I should head home and keep packing.

More Geese

I mean it. Geese: 

Visions of Flight

But I'm going to say something quick, first. Working on a project based on where you live is...strange, wonderful, enlightening. Beyond the sudden ability to visualize older versions of this small city, I've had the unsettling experience of learning more about the place than life-long residents. Now, to be sure, the people I work with know more about what it has been like to live here for their entire lives so far, but I can point out new significant details to them. I'll try to remember to explore the implications of that later.

Now, on to birds!

I mentioned house guests and snow geese a week ago. Right, so we didn't get a chance to see many Sandhill cranes, but we did get to see these other birds instead. I'll try to do this so that the image below will blossom into a big ol' picture if you click on it. Let me know if that works. 

Our first clue about the birds came from the highway.

So we pulled off to investigate further. And walk along the lake with the girl, who remained oblivious to the wall of sound. Geese are, you can see, quite social.

After this lovely time looking at calm birds, something set them off. Or at least quite a few of them.

I'll have to continue this little narrative later...

A New Year Full of Birthday Celebrations

So Wendy will turn one this year... And I don't know how to follow that up. 

I think that most of the people I know are interested in how the toxin flush we started in November will change how we feel in mid-January. I am delighted that we'll have a leader who listens to scientists--research and climate. Will we turn back to our own infrastructure? Will we address that infrastructure in ways that look to the future instead of recapitulating the 19th century's scorched earth, build big approach? And wouldn't it be nice to have a conversation about how to assess education that doesn't straight-jacket teachers (a topic very popular here in this house)?

And we have our own transition here with its attendant questions. So far, we're trying to limit the amount of cheap plastic doodads that Wendy gets, but so many of the baby tech items (eg, monitors) are just that. We keep sending people notes about wooden toys (PlanToys, Haba, etc), but these are expensive, as are the practices that would be better...maybe. Disposable or cloth diapers? Oh, it's an ugly question, and the answer is knotted and involves questions of money, labor, water... Ah, but I hear--over the monitor--the sounds of squirming. So. Must go. But you can see scads of pix here.

Wendelynne!

She's now almost a week old, so I've been neglecting the blog. To make up for this, I'll post a few pictures. 

Storms of Autumn

Some recent pictures from our backyard.

Why Not Pictures?

Indeed. I've been reading the new Orion. Wonderful, but always painful. So some silly pix instead.

Here's what I see out my window at work:

And some views at home. Me with my cat:

Me with my daughter:

Pictures, Derive-ative

Heading out, north across South St:

This alley was labeled as a deadend. Like a career in poetry, one presumes:

This block of Lincoln has "No Trespassing" signs up all over. Good luck:

A close-up of the hard-rented brick house from the above picture:

Up, over, around and down by the railroad tracks, there's an earthberm house:

Long as I'm out walking, taking pictures, why not stand in the middle of the road to take some:

The patterns tires leave in a middle school parking lot:

I'm getting away from pedestrian friendly spaces. But here's a birdcage for you:

And the lack of sidewalk:

More train tracks. No river in sight:

Shelter for lease:

Lincoln. Ground Zero:

After starting at the early south edge of town and wandering through what used to be ocean, forest, plains and farms, I end up here:

The cabin will not open until much later in the evening:

We met back up for frothy adult beverages. As you can plainly see.

The one Deriveur missing from the picture, Trey, came in a bit late. And now he's gone and moved himself to Indianapolis. Damn.

And now the Fourth of July is upon us. My brother and his many offspring will be springing around our yard for the next several days, so I won't be back to the internets for a bit. Or doing much of anything else, really. Cheers.