“It was hard,” McGillen told the Capital City Weekly in a phone interview, adding it was a drastic change from her usual poetry or essays. “With fiction, it’s more pulling out maps, putting up posters on your wall, putting up timelines, color coding characters. Trying to get all the complicated storylines and subplots figured out. You just feel like you’re on some kind of FBI raid. It’s super intense. It was all I was thinking about.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
She said “In Sight of the Mountain” came together in spurts of writing while her 2-year-old napped.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
[Seattle photographer and Juneau publisher team up for boutique books<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t “It was the perfect time for me to have a little bit of time for myself and carve that out,” McGillen said.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t “In Sight of the Mountain” is the debut novel of author Jamie McGillen, who was born in Juneau and now lives in Washington state. It was published in September. (Courtesy Photo | Jamie McGillen)<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t She said she was inspired to write her novel after seeing a life-size poster depicting Faye Fuller, who was the first recorded woman of European descent to summit Mount <\/a>Rainier<\/a>.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t “I was just staring at it thinking, ‘What would that have been like?’” McGillen said. “I wanted to tell her story, but I also didn’t want to take her story away from her.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t While Fuller makes a cameo in the book, “In Sight of the Mountain” is the story of Anna Gallagher, a young woman with mountaineering dreams living with the fallout of the Great Seattle Fire.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t “The main character is basically struggling with the aftermath of that, and the pressures of getting married and financial strains, but what she really wants to do is summit Mount Rainier,” McGillen said. “In 1889, women aren’t mountaineers yet, and it’s a struggle for agency to be able to do that. As the pioneers were coming out and Seattle was more of a frontier town, it was really acceptable for women to be chopping down wood and building a cabin, but as it became more of a settled city and the population grew, it was like, ‘OK, go back to your place.’ It was weird for the women who watched their moms and grandmas do things that they were not allowed to do.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t McGillen said she classifies the book as young adult historical fiction, but some of the people who have responded most strongly to the book have been older reasons, and it wasn’t written specifically to cater to adolescents.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t![\"“In](\"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/18773502_web1_In-Sight-of-the-Mountain---ebook---FINAL-copy.jpg\")
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