Non-Alaskans that watch reality television may have what they think is a clear idea of Alaska: scary bears, stormy seas, feuding hotel owners. Odds are, though, that\u2019s different from what you \u2014 and every other Alaskan \u2014 knows. Yet, each Alaskan understands Alaska in a different way, too, and that understanding influences how you understand yourself within it — and, if you\u2019re an artist, portray it.<\/p>\n
At a recent 49 Writers CrossCurrents panel, moderator Scott Burton of KTOO led three writers and a photographer in discussing how the north and its landscape has influenced their work.<\/p>\n
Melinda Moustakis, author of \u201cBear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories,\u201d was born in Fairbanks to a family that originally arrived in Alaska to homestead. She left when she was a toddler, but her family mythology was \u201cshaped by the north\u201d \u2014 the name of the panel.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you hear a story growing up\u2026 how it changes is a lot like a fishing story,\u201d Moustakis said. \u201c(As a fiction writer,) my job is to excavate and cultivate.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Ernestine Hayes, author of \u201cBlonde Indian,\u201d it begins with her grandmother.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always think of my grandmother and the way she connected me to the world, not as being at the top of the hierarchy but as equal to my relatives, the wind, the bear, and so on,\u201d she said. \u201cThat to me has always been the fundamental aspect of how place shapes my identity. But\u2026 it is landscape and the land that has, as its consequence, the colonial impact on Native lives. And perhaps even more than the belief that the bear is my cousin, and the wind is my grandfather, (what) even more strongly shaped my identity was the colonial experience, which is based on land.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Brendan Jones, author of the forthcoming novel \u201cThe Alaskan Laundry,\u201d first came to Sitka to work at a hatchery at 19, he was \u201cdisgusted by it, initially,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d grown up in Philadelphia and found Sitka overwhelming.<\/p>\n
\u201cComing to Sitka just blew the top of my head off, and not in a very nice way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Then he moved into the woods and began paying attention to smells. Sounds. Details.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think time plays a really large role in distilling those details and helping them come into relief,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Photographer Ben Huff, author of \u201cThe Last Road North\u201d first came to Alaska via Fairbanks in the summer of 2005. He, too had a hard time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up as a product of sort of a National Geographic childhood,\u201d he said. \u201cI had this idea of what Alaska was\u2026. The place was challenging and foreign to me in a way that I didn\u2019t expect.\u201d<\/p>\n
He made pictures in the land; he made them in downtown Fairbanks. Both felt dishonest.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat spot in the middle, that messy bit that was what I was struggling with, that I found complicated, that I found unsettling, was really the thing that I wanted to know more about,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s fascinated by the overlap of Alaska\u2019s wilder places and \u201cthese spaces that we\u2019ve created,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Moustakis said her goal \u201cwas to get Alaska right the way that my family has experienced it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is populated, and people have been here,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a fraught history\u2026 I wanted, in my own way, to bring that complication and sort of dark underbelly.\u201d<\/p>\n
A more complex picture of Alaska is emerging, one supported by the current Renaissance in Alaskan fiction, Jones said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s really an interesting time where we\u2019re moving from these reality shows into that imagined space,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s really exciting time for the state and the state of literature.\u201d<\/p>\n
Place, Hayes said \u201cemerges from place itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a panorama to be conquered,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are bones that are buried in what others might call wilderness\u2026 it\u2019s something that can be developed and defined by our words, but it\u2019s not something that depends on our words to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact CCW staff writer Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Non-Alaskans that watch reality television may have what they think is a clear idea of Alaska: scary bears, stormy seas, feuding hotel owners. Odds are, though, that\u2019s different from what you \u2014 and every other Alaskan \u2014 knows. Yet, each Alaskan understands Alaska in a different way, too, and that understanding influences how you understand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":9250,"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-9249","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\/9249","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=9249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9249"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=9249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}