River of Play

Stumbling to Equinox

I’ve lost track of time, I think. How long have we lived in this place?

Part of the losing track comes from recognition of home, learning the rhythms of where we live. We’ve had overnight lows in the 20s recently. It’s finally dark enough to see the auror a when I’m up and getting breakfast ready. Fishing is tapering off, the berries are about done, and people are coming back with moose, caribou, and sheep.

Of course, I like this feeling that I know the equinox is coming and that everyone around me knows it, too. We’re a bit anxious about winter, but we’re also looking forward to skiing, snowshoeing, sledding—the excuses to double the hot chocolate and add a bit more brandy.

The patterns feel like an old rhythm, like patterns any of our ancestors would recognize, even if they wouldn’t recognize the snow tires and gore-tex. Or the planning for ways to protect iPods on a winter ramble.

Maybe it’s the gray that has me feeling expansive. Gray in the sky, gold on the leaves. A little woodsmoke. I think I’ll stop for wine on the way home. Join me, won’t you?

The Annual Barbaric AWP

AWP season never ends. They start taking proposals about a week after the conference ends, then book fair reservations start, and then the hotels open. A wearying ouroboros.

But also quite fun.

The Seattle AWP will be my tenth, but I have friends who remember when under a hundred people were getting together for the conference. Can that be right?

There’s a flurry of activity up here for panel organization. We are finally part of the regional interest. And we’re interested in being interested. I know because pretty much every writer I know here is planning on attending.

Of course, plans and actual attendance are two different things. Because even though Seattle is the next airport south of Anchorage (actually, that would be Hawaii, but work with me), it’s still over two thousand miles away. We think about that a lot.

Book Fair at Boston

 

Before we moved up here, we told friends and colleagues that moving to Alaska in the 21^st century isn’t like moving to Alaska in the 20^th century. And we’ve been right about that. We have serviceable internet, so that makes up for a lot of distance. Skype, cell phones, Amazon, moose, lynx, wolves—we’ve got it all, baby.

But we’re still a long, long way from the Lower 48.

Mostly, that fact is easy to ignore. We go on our own strange way and ignore the rest of the country. But we do try to be part of the conversation, which is where AWP comes in. We have this feeling that we’re easy to ignore even as reality television programming keeps adding Alaska content. So we’ll wave our hands and see who stops by to listen.

And remember: proposals are due by May 1.

Organizer tip: Read the proposal book and successful descriptions
!

Punctuated Migration

I wrote an essay/meditation/scholarly piece a few years back about punctuated migration, the contemporary practice of moving every few years (once a decade, maybe) that might well start in childhood. This situation sets those of us interested in place-based writing into a strange situation: if we’re not a dirt elite (been on one piece of land for generations), then how can we write while holding any kind of claim to the place? My argument boils down to respect and openness, a listening curiosity.

In the piece, I argue that we take our places with us, but we—that is, anyone interested in the pattern of punctuated migration while maintaining place-based interests—must avoid letting those places from our past overwhelm the present. We need to let the new places speak clearly. That attitude is especially important in my role (now, not so new) as an editor, and there’s something about this place, Alaska, that has a lot to listen to.

I count myself lucky, of course, that so much of that conversation comes into my office. It’s a unique experience, I think, for a cheechako moving up to learn so much about the place so quickly. And from so many different directions: poetry, snow science, history, geography… The list goes on.

The next step, though, is connecting back. What did those other places, those other landscapes, people, and his history give to me that I can take into this place? I’m beginning to develop some answers. I’ve been thinking a lot about agriculture and Alaska, and about the complicated sense of being overlooked while also being criticized. So I’ve imported some of the Midwest and Appalachia, but I’m always looking for how Alaska diverges from where I’ve been, trying to hear the place on its own.

Here’s the difficult part of the listening: Alaska is simply too large to contain. As someone in the Interior, I don’t have access to the ocean. Or the oil fields to the north. We get far less snow than the Gulf, and we’re not even close to the amount of rainfall the rain forests get. In short, still a lot of listening to be done.

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.