The first time Brendan Jones moved to Sitka, he was 19 years old and lost.<\/p>\n
He volunteered at Sheldon Jackson Hatchery in exchange for room and board. He built a hut and lived in the woods off Indian River. He wrote for the Daily Sitka Sentinel. Most of all, during those nine months he fell in love with Alaska.<\/p>\n
That experience was a formative one both for him and his debut novel, out this spring. \u201cThe Alaskan Laundry\u201d follows East Coast expat and boxer Tara Marconi as she moves to Port Anna, Alaska in an attempt to recover from her mother\u2019s recent death, to figure out what she wants, and purge herself of anger through work, self-exploration, and friendship. Over the course of the book, she climbs the fisheries ladder from hatchery assistant to crabber on the Bering Sea, pursues her dream of owning the tugboat docked at the Port Anna harbor, and comes to know life in Alaska. In the sixth chapter, Jones writes:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen she thought about the East Coast, she saw it as cities revolving around the sun of New York \u2014 Philadelphia like Mercury, Washington like Mars, Boston, Saturn. Here on this island, it was as if her planet had slipped its ellipse and she was floating around some gentler, more mysterious sun. She couldn\u2019t see it yet, but she could already feel it, the few times when she stopped fighting and allowed herself to be guided by this new force. It was somewhere in those woods, hidden beneath the ice fields, deep in the river valleys.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones, who worked on the novel for 10 years, was sitting at Highliner Coffee in Sitka when he began to write Tara\u2019s character.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Highliner Coffee) is run by a woman from Petersburg with real fishing history,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s got this wall of framed photos, and they\u2019re all women commercial fishing.\u201d<\/p>\n
One in particular struck him and became the genesis of Tara, but the older female fishermen he\u2019s met in Sitka \u201care just really amazing women \u2014 incredible to talk with, because they make a point that they were never made to feel like outcasts in the fishing industry,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s so much about whether you were catching or not, not anything to do with gender.\u201d<\/p>\n
Initially, Tara wasn\u2019t the main character \u2014 she was one of many. She ended up, however, being \u201cthe last character standing.\u201d Just the same, in addition to Tara, \u201cThe Alaskan Laundry\u201d is filled with colorful Alaskans whose characters ring true. Newt, one of Tara\u2019s closest friends, tells her:<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Important thing is, I\u2019m stayin\u2019 clean as a broke-d*** dog up here with my eye on that big steak in the sky. Because lemme be the one to tell you \u2014 all of us in this state are just getting whipped around on one continuous cycle, washed clean of our sins. You wait it out, be patient, work hard, keep your eye on that channel marker, and by my word there\u2019s a payoff.\u2019 His skin appeared transparent in the last rays of the sun. A purple vein zigzagged down his forehead.\u201d The idea of the laundry cycle, Jones has said, stems from a conversation he had with \u201ca pickled fisherman\u201d years ago.<\/p>\n
Jones\u2019 life hasn\u2019t followed the same trajectory as many modern-day writers.<\/p>\n
Instead of getting an MFA (Master of Fine Arts,) he did a carpentry apprenticeship program for Alaska\u2019s Local 1281. In Philadelphia, he started a business that had 24 employees and did $1.5 million in business in one year. In the summers, he\u2019s commercial fished for years.<\/p>\n
In 2011, after living in Philadelphia for five years, he \u201cstupidly\u201d leaped off a waterfall \u2014 and slipped. Though he ended up being okay, it scared him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt turned my head around. I decided where I want to be is Alaska,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After he sold his house and his share in the construction business, he ran into the same problem many Alaskan would-be home-buyers do: prices.<\/p>\n
Then he saw a World War II-era tugboat for sale in Sitka. The Adak is a sister tugboat to the Challenger, which sank in Gastineau Channel last year. With a little TLC, it\u2019s been a great home for him, his wife, Rachel Jones, and his daughter Haley Marie, he said.<\/p>\n
Much of \u201cThe Alaskan Laundry\u201d was written with the help of a Stegner Fellowship. The Stegner, one of the most coveted fellowships a writer can get, gave Jones two funded years at Stanford to focus on his writing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t have financially done so much of the work on this timeline without that Stegner,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was such a blessing.\u201d Stanford also gave him a community of fellow writers, and the opportunity to work with acclaimed authors like Tobias Wolff and Adam Johnson.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Alaskan Laundry\u201d has been through a lot of changes in the more than 10 years it\u2019s been in the works. In 2013, Jones published an excerpt from the book in the literary journal Ploughshares. That excerpt is \u201cwildly different from the book as it is now,\u201d he said. \u201cI ended up rebuilding the boat as it was going down the river, in a sense \u2014 going plank by plank instead of sinking the whole thing and starting over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Initially, Tara moved to Sitka itself. Then Jones started thinking about the ethics of naming, say, a traditional spots for gathering mussels. He also started thinking about the book \u201cThe Yiddish Policemen\u2019s Union,\u201d by Michael Chabon. \u201cHe made up everything except the name \u2018Sitka,\u2019 and I think he did a real disservice to the people living in the town,\u201d Jones said.<\/p>\n
Once he came up with the name \u201cPort Anna,\u201d taking a cue from David Guterson\u2019s \u201cSnow Falling on Cedars,\u201d which imagines a new name for Bainbridge Island, the book \u201cstarted to breathe more,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s on his book tour right now, and will be doing readings in Sitka, Juneau, Homer and Anchorage. He also wants to schedule one in Haines and Fairbanks, he said.<\/p>\n
His Sitka reading is May 17, 6 p.m. at Old Harbor Books; his Juneau reading is scheduled for June 4, 6 p.m. at the Mendenhall Valley Public Library.<\/p>\n
\u201cI definitely wrote it with Alaskans in mind,\u201d Jones said. \u201cWhat\u2019s most important to me is that it hits home with people that live in the state, because that\u2019s where I make my home. It\u2019s a book written in honor of the state I fell in love with at a very young age. I see it\u2026 as a way of giving back to Alaska. I was such a lost cookie, and the community of Sitka and Southeast gave me so much… that I needed where I was at the age of 19.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact Capital City Weekly managing editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first time Brendan Jones moved to Sitka, he was 19 years old and lost. He volunteered at Sheldon Jackson Hatchery in exchange for room and board. He built a hut and lived in the woods off Indian River. He wrote for the Daily Sitka Sentinel. Most of all, during those nine months he fell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":24219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-24218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24218"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=24218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}