You know the memes that say some variation of, “I hope this email doesn’t find you. I hope you are free,” illustrated by computers grown over with vines or skeletons running into the ocean?  

That’s how I want to start every email, which is a rough way to launch a newsletter, but it’s a rough time for a lot of things and I am not prone to sugar-coating. I imagine that your attention and energies are scattered and your email inbox is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. I will do my best to honor your time and your presence here, in this non-space, reading my words. 

And so: welcome. These emails will be a monthly(ish) update on my writing, wandering thoughts, and reading recommendations, and will likely be a bit messy and evolve over time. If you don’t wish to receive them and/or prefer to communicate via other platforms, unsubscribe freely (I do, truly, want you to be free). 

This one will be a bit longer than most; there’s a lot to catch up on/I don’t always know when to stop. It contains the following:

• Ghosts of Distant Trees coming in 2025

• I was on a boat! (I mean ship)

• Maybe we’re all on a boat, together, and we need to learn some things?

• An upcoming class for Alaska writers

Ghosts of Distant Trees coming 2025, which is a real year in a future that we will soon be living in

I’m excited to share the news that my first essay collection, Ghosts of Distant Trees, will be published by Porphyry Press, a small Alaska press based in McCarthy, Alaska, in late in 2025. This collection is centered around finding home in the Denali National Park community and ecosystem, and explores relationship to place, gender, conservation narratives, and climate change.

This book has been a slow journey, with many pauses and detours, and I haven’t always known the shape of what it needed to be in order to feel finished. I started to doubt that I wanted it to be one at all; maybe it was time to just move on to something new. But conversations with Porphyry founder/publisher Jeremy Pataky brought it back into focus, and when we decided to go for it, it felt like a natural fit. 

Check out the full announcement, and learn more about Porphyry Press, here.

I particularly love this description of the Porphyry’s mission: 

Our commitment...is to an ever-broadening whole community that Alaska is privy to and part of not from the fringes, not from terra incognita, but from the center of many crossing roads and airways that together map home as a point of interrelation. 

Jeremy said, “it seems right that this book with one weird road in a national park at its heart should be published from the end of another weird road in a national park.” 

For a taste of what kinds of weird road stories we’re talking, here’s an essay published in 2021, “The Last Time it Happened That Way,” in Terrain.org.

I’ll share more about this book in the months ahead; thank you for coming along.

Driftwood, rope, and shower alarms: early notes from the Arctic Circle Residency 

I spent the first half of October sailing around Svalbard as part of the Arctic Circle Residency on a beautiful and storied tall ship called the Antigua.(*) This residency gathers artists of all disciplines on a two week journey, and I’ll be making sense of it (or, perhaps, finding that sense isn’t what is asking to be made) for some time. Here are some early notes. 

I’d never spent much time on a boat before (or, as some of us non-boat people learned to say, a “ship,” a word which seems to carry more dignity and specificity but took some deliberate effort to add to my vocabulary), and it’s sort of embarrassing to admit how little the sailing part factored into my interest in trip. My stated purpose was, in part, to expand my understanding of the global far north, and part of the gaps in my consciousness include…well, the sea. 

I wrote several pages and a couple bad poems about the driftwood that washes up on Svalbard’s treeless shores, carried by currents from Siberian rivers. In addition to trees uprooted by floods and processed wood lost from logging boats, the beaches are scattered with old ladders and door frames, micro-plastics, liquor bottles, coffee tins. The ghosts of human enterprise and extraction are well-traveled, and they sometimes take the form of sun and salt-bleached trees.

But I also developed an awe of technologies of ocean travel: the arts of ropes and sails, watertightness and safety protocols. 

The first night on board, our captain, who led a small crew of charming Dutch sailors, gave us a rundown of rules and emergency protocols, and explained that the automated fire alarms can’t differentiate between steam and smoke. He asked that we always close the door in our cabins when showering, or the escaping steam would set off the alarms. If the fire alarm goes off, it most likely means someone is showering with the door open. In the case of real fire or other emergency, he or the crew will sound another alarm manually, an alarm we should respond to. 

A couple days later, I sat journaling at a table in the galley with a handful of others who sketched, wrote, or sewed. The fire alarm startled us to attention, and one person, remembering what we’d learned, said calmly, “oh, that’s just the shower alarm.” We returned to our work. The alarm was soon silenced. I wrote in my journal “just the shower alarm.”  

Looking back on those words six weeks later, it feels like a half-baked metaphor about trust and knowledge: How do we know when the person telling us not to panic has our best interests in mind, or when they are deceiving us into complacency for their own benefit and/or our own peril? 

How do we know that they understand fire?      

You probably know where this is going.

I returned to Alaska just in time for the US election, and spent the day itself working the polls at our statistically irrelevant and wholesome polling place. It’s always good to have a project on election days. 

And as results were finalized, another meme flooded my feeds: variations on Toni Morrison’s quote following the 2004 election: “This is precisely the time artists get to work…We speak, we write, we do language.” But I could only focus on small, mundane tasks: split wood, carry water type shit. Every tool and appliance seemed on the verge of breaking or needing deep, attentive cleaning. I was jet-lagged but denied it.

I’m not too proud to tell you I swore at a vacuum cleaner, and that I’m not the member of my household who took it apart and carefully removed the rat-sized clumps of dog hair clogging its every crevice but the one who shoved it in a corner and said we might never be able to clean again. Like a laughably banal variation on Langston Hughes’ words:, “Let us take a knife / And cut the world in two- / And see what worms are eating / At the rind”; you have to actually look at the problem in order to address it.

My friend Malena, who understands ropes and boats, political organizing, fire, and grief, offered this while I was fighting with a vacuum: 

In working with rope you’re always seeing how many different threads form strength, and I think that’s very much a concept we need to be chatting about today.

We just had an election between two political projects and it’s on us to examine the threads that make up the relative strengths of both lines…

Tending rope and nets is similar. If you're not always fixing, you're vulnerable to storms.

Read more from Malena here. 

Upcoming classes: nonfiction workshop series with 49 Writers

I'll be facilitating a series of virtual workshops this winter with 49 Writers, a literary non-profit serving Alaska-based writers, starting December 11. These will be participant-led spaces for writers to share works in progress and get constructive feedback from others. Sign up for one or all three (um, or two).

For a sample workshop itinerary and registration information, visit: 49writers.org/events.

As a reward for reading this far, enjoy this music video, illustrated by artist Josh Dorman, who I met on board the Antigua:

We the People (F*ck the Man)

(*) This residency was supported by sponsorships from The Northern Center, Denali Education Center, more than 40 individual donors, and the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation