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Writing in Alaska

DouglasIslandJuneau“The Son of Rainy Mountain” is a piece I began just after I moved over a thousand miles north from Juneau, Alaska to my home now in Barrow. The contrast between Arctic Alaska and Southeast Alaska struck me deeply: Barrow has the stark beauty of endless tundra and a frozen ocean while Juneau is a place of mountains, green, and constant rain. When I missed Juneau, it felt like missing an entirely different world: trees, wind storms, rain, and the smell of wet earth. Compare that with Mt. Juneau towering over the town, wreathed in patches of fog like the floating island in Gulliver’s travels and you have a pretty surreal image of the place you used to live.

I have always been fascinated with rural Alaska. It is difficult to get around since there are no roads, so the feeling of isolation is a unique experience. Places you have heard about less than 20 miles away take on an almost mystical quality. The waterways in Southeast are speckled with ruins of old camps or strange, unexplained buildings stranded in the wilderness. The town of Rainy Mountain is drawn up from such stories of quiet, forgotten places. Having lived in isolated, rural Alaska for a few years now I have collected all sorts of old stories and histories that seem to carry with them that magic of the “almost forgotten.” In many ways, these are the images from which “The Son of Rainy Mountain,” is drawn, mixed with details borrowed from my former life in Juneau. A friend of mine living in his hammock up on Mt. Juneau used to rub his feet with of lavender oil in order to ward off trench-foot from living outside in the rain, and it was this detail that first inspired the story.

It is difficult for me to know how to talk in depth about my process as a writer and my craft. Whenever I’m asked about my writing I find it suddenly very difficult to express myself. Writing to me is very personal, as I think it is to most writers, and talking about it in intellectual themes often feels to me like I am trying to explain away a magic trick when I do not completely understand the secret.

I have been writing since I was very young, but it wasn’t until I encountered mentors in college that I really developed a true process my work. When I attended the University of Iowa I used to rob the boxes of the graduate students at the Iowa Writers Workshop in order to read their stories. I eventually worked up the nerve to enroll in fiction classes taught by them and a few of their teachers. A few who come to mind are Jeffery Snowbarger, Elinathan Ohiomoba, and Pulitzer-prize winning author James McPherson, who is one of the kindest and most encouraging teachers I have ever had. Though they were all wonderful, my instructor the fall semester of my senior year, Matthew Neill Null, undoubtedly had the most impact on me. His dedication to his class, his craft, and to me as a student came at a time of great need for me in my life and my development as a writer. Without him, my other teachers, and the wonderful friends I have had read my work throughout the years, I don’t know what kind of writer I would be today.

Living in Barrow has proved interesting in for my writing. There is something to be said for isolation, it keeps you desperate and hungry, but in the end that can prove overwhelming. I have few other writers to talk to, no coffee shops to sit in, looking pensive and writerly, and no bars to jot down notes in late at night. I live in a native Inupiaq whaling village that is frozen 10 months out of the year and polar bears are more frequent than poetry readings. It is, at the risk of sounding pretentious, the potential of undiscovered stories that keeps me writing. These communities are fascinating, the landscapes unparallel, and in the same way Juneau and Southeast Alaska inspired “The Son of Rainy Mountain,” I am certain Barrow will inspire its own stories. 

 

 Mirri Glasson-Darling lives in Barrow, Alaska: the northern most community in the United States. Prior to living in Alaska, she attended the University of Iowa where she was fortunate enough to have such instructors as Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Allen McPherson. She is an editor for Ilisagvik Tribal College’s debut literary journal, Aglaun and currently working on a novel.  Her writing has appeared in such literary journals as Bosque and The Birch. You can follow her on twitter @MirriGD.

 

 

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Charting

compass for charting

Neal Kitterlin’s poetry was featured on The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review earlier in the week. Here, Kitterlin discusses his approach to and process of writing.

There is the map, and there is the territory. The two cannot be confused. In my most recent writing, I have been concerned with place and what it signifies: does my personal understanding of a place belong to the set of tools designed to help me understand and navigate it? Or, do my experiences shape and form the place itself on some more fundamental level?

In an attempt to answer this question, I consider the Chicago area. In that city I may travel along the geography of my memory and consider: this is the place where I met her, this is the place I received that phone call, this is the street I walked every day for three years. But when considering a place where I have no first-hand memories and no personal experience, I still bring associations. I have never been to Seattle, for example, but when I hear the word I think of grunge and the Supersonics. Yet as I write about these spaces, I keep in mind that there is a whole set of associations for someone born ten years earlier, for someone born ten years later, and for someone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest all her life. Which Seattle is the real one?Which portion belongs to the map. Which portion belongs to the territory?

These questions are equally present for the fictional places that populate our increasingly ubiquitous pop culture landscape, as well as those that form the foundations of our myths and religions. What Jotunheim or Valhalla meant to a Norseman in the Viking age is very different than what it may mean to someone with a passing knowledge of Norse mythology today. And my approach to it, as a fan of Marvel Comics and Jack Kirby, is very different from either. Another map. Another territory. Another exploration.

When writing, I think of a place, real or imagined, and consider the associations that spring to mind. From these associations, I craft a scene, a quick glimpse of a place that bore perhaps some tangential relation to the source material, but through the filter of my thoughts and memories. As I continue to write, I notice that through-lines had emerged. I write of exploration and adventure, of a cosmic outreach that somehow goes hand-in-hand with an inner journey into darkness. I am simultaneously describing a place familiar to us all and unique to me as an individual, mixing map and territory together in a way that I hope is both intensely personal and universally relatable.

I am guided in my explorations of these territories by other works that have provided some influence, whether in craft or in theme. In creating these brief glimpses, I am influenced greatly by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and by Borges’ body of meta-fictions. I also think of the work in the context of other, more recent books of maps and lists, such as Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby and James Tadd Adcox’s The Map of the System of Human Knowledge. I only hope that my work can succeed in conveying the hyperbolic sense of wonder, the sense of transport and guidance through the unknown that these works achieve. There are works of sequential art that do this, such as Warren Ellis’ and John Cassaday’s Planetary and much of Grant Morrison’s comics output. The journeys through worlds both real and imagined, their strangeness, and the fractal nature of time and space are the soil in which these pieces are nurtured.

Through my work, I hope to transport the reader to a place she has yet to discover, but that is also somehow hauntingly familiar, to force her to consider what she brings with her and what she finds waiting. I want to present both the known and unknown in a new light – whether that place is the Viking halls of old, the dark haunts of elder gods, worlds far beyond the stars, or the recesses of our own secret heart.

 

Neal Kitterlin lives with his wife and child in Matteson, Illinois. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, HOUSEFIRE, NAP, Red Lightbulbs, and other places. His e-chap, ‘Decisions’, is currently available from Love Symbol Press. Find him on twitter @NealKitterlin or at infinitegestures.tumblr.com.