Title: Seth Kantner

Title: Seth Kantner American Writer ( 1965 - ) Source: Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2005. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Biography Bookmark: Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning Updated:06/01/2005

Table of Contents:Awards Career Further Readings About the Author Personal Information Sidelights Writings by the Author

PERSONAL INFORMATION:

Born 1965, in AK; married; children: one daughter. Education: University of Montana, B.A. (journalism). Addresses: Home: Kotzebue, AK. Agent: c/o Author Mail, Milkweed Editions, Open Book Bldg., Suite 300, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55415-1246.

CAREER:

Writer and photographer. Has worked variously as a trapper, fisherman, gardener, mechanic, igloo builder, and adjunct professor.

AWARDS:

Milkweed National Fiction Prize and Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, both 2004, both for Ordinary Wolves.

WORKS:

WRITINGS:

 Ordinary Wolves (novel), Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 2004.

Contributor of writings and photographs to periodicals, including Alaska, Prairie Schooner, Outside, Switch!, Reader's Digest, and Alaska Geographic; also contributor to anthologies.

Sidelights

Seth Kantner was born in a sod igloo in Alaska and was home schooled by his parents. Since childhood, he has photographed the vast region where he learned to hunt and fish and where he communed with the native peoples. Kantner has contributed his photographs and essays to a number of periodicals, but with his debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, he presents a detailed picture of life growing up in Alaska. Milkweed Editions purchased the novel and worked with Kantner to refine it and make it publishable. Each spring, Kantner sent Emilie Buchwald, the book's editor, a draft, and later in the summer, Buchwald returned it with editorial comments. Kantner revised over the winter and sent the next draft to Buchwald after the ice melted and he could travel to the post office. This went on for four years.

A Publishers Weekly contributor called Ordinary Wolves "a tour de force" and perhaps "the best treatment of the Northwest and its people since Jack London's works." Kantner said in an interview posted on Milkweed Editions Online that early-twentieth-century novelist London was part of his inspiration for becoming a writer "He said when you spat or pissed it crackled and froze before it hit the ground. It never did that when I was a kid, reading Jack--it got to seventy-eight below one time, and it never did that. But the whole world believed it did because of London."

In Ordinary Wolves artist Abe Hawley came to Alaska to find his bush-pilot father, fell in love with the wilderness, and stayed. His wife could not bear the isolation and hardship, however, and left him to raise their three children alone. The youngest child, who is known by his Inupiaq name, Cutuk, watches his brother, Jerry, leave for Fairbanks, and his sister, Iris, go off to college in Anchorage to become a teacher. Cutuk, who has never found his place in either the native or white cultures, becomes curious about life away from the tundra and travels to Anchorage, where he is overcome with sensory overload. He eventually returns to Takunak and Dawna, the young woman he has loved since childhood, and who may become his future companion.

Library Journal reviewer Jim Coan felt that the novel's "real depth" is found in the scenes in which Cutak is alone, hunting, stalking wolves, driving a dog team, and negotiating an environment "that, while harsh, is nevertheless in many ways more amenable than contemporary urban America." Booklist contributor Donna Seaman called Kantner an "impressively fluent and probing first-time novelist."