University of Alaska Press Fall 2008 Spring 2009 University of Alaska Press Nonprofit Organization PO Box 756240 U.S. Postage Fairbanks AK 99775-6240 PAID Permit No. 2 Fairbanks, AK FALL 2008 Living With Wildness Bill Sherwonit Bill Sherwonit has added a fine new volume to the literature of place, a literature that may be the most vital and venture- some of any kind being written in America today. Tracing “the intelligence of nature” from the streets of Anchorage to the mountains of Alaska’s Brooks Range, he marvels over chickadees and grizzlies, wood frogs and sandhill cranes, moose and mice and countless other creatures, along with snow and stars and shimmering northern lights. In prose as clear as an unsullied stream, he tells about his search for the Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, wildness in the depths of mind that answers to the wildness nature writer BILL SHERWONIT in the world. has called Alaska home since —Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe 1982. He worked a dozen years at newspapers, including a Like one of his winter days in Anchorage, Sherwonit’s book is decade at the Anchorage Times. bright and calm. Its gifts are a wild landscape of delight and Sherwonit has contributed essays a lesson in attentiveness. and articles to a wide variety of —Kathleen Dean Moore, author of The Pine Island Paradox newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies; his essay “In Bill Sherwonit writes, “I never imagined myself becoming the Company of Bears” (now a a resident of America’s ‘last frontier.’” But in 1974, at age chapter in Living with Wildness) twenty-four, he arrived in Alaska, wide open to the experi- was selected for the Best American ence. This series of essays explores the author’s relationship Science and Nature Writing 2007. with the wild, both internal and external. His encounters Sherwonit is also the author of ten previous books about Alaska. In follow along a continuum of “wildness.” his spare time, he teaches nature “Wilderness is a place,” he says. “Wildness, on the other and adventure/travel writing. hand, is a quality, a state of being.” The author finds wildness Sherwonit lives in Anchorage’s Turnagain area. His website is in the comings and goings of songbirds at the feeder, a hali- www.billsherwonit.alaskawriters. but on a line, and deep within his own internal landscape. com. This book reveals Sherwonit’s experience as an authentic effort to understand and engage with his surroundings. In the process it shows us the way to access the wildness in our own lives. Nature • Essays • Literature 6 x 9, 232 pages Paperback $21.95 / isbn 978-1-60223-014-9 www.uaf.edu/uapress | toll-free 1-888-252-6657 3 FALL 2008 Crosscurrents North is a beautiful, heart-breaking, and desperately important book. Alaska, the last frontier, may be humanity’s last chance to figure out how to live in a place without wrecking it. Whether Alaskans succeed or fail means the world to each of us, no matter where we live. What the book says—in the measured tones of Native elders, in the wind-scoured words of Alaska’s fine writers, in the blunt speech of trappers and fishers—is this: “There are people who MARYBETH HOLLEMAN is author love this bountiful, bruised land. Help us defend it.” of The Heart of the Sound: An —Kathleen Dean Moore, author of The Pine Island Paradox Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost. Her award-winning essays, This is a book of being with the land. Most importantly, poetry, and articles have appeared it is a book of living organisms, all of whom appear to know in many journals, magazines, and more than humans. anthologies. She is also author —Linda Hogan, author of People of the Whale of Alaska’s Prince William Sound: A Traveler’s Guide and The State of In this collection of sixty-one essays and poems, Alaskan the Sound, and teaches creative authors celebrate the wildness and wonder of the land writing and women’s studies at the and raise questions about our relationship with the natu- University of Alaska Anchorage. ral world. The pieces express admiration and awe of the She lives in the foothills of the Chugach Mountains with her landscape and its wild inhabitants. They bear witness to the husband and son. effects of climate change and react to the environmental side effects of development. They ponder the irony of the ANNE CORAY, author of Bone Strings, lives at her birthplace authors’ own impact, caused by the fact that they live here. on remote Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Among the contributors to this anthology are John Haines, Clark) in southwest Alaska. Her Nick Jans, Marjorie Kowalski Cole, Sherry Simpson, Bill poems have appeared in many publications and she has been Sherwonit, and a foreword by Jay Hammond, former gover- a finalist with Carnegie Mellon, nor of Alaska. All are passionate about their world. Water Press & Media, and Bright Hill Press, as well as for the Frances Locke Memorial Award and the Rita Dove Poetry Award. Environmental Studies • Literature 6 x 9, 336 pages Paperback $26.95 / isbn 978-1-60223-022-4 4 FALL 2008 | University of Alaska Press FALL 2008 Until Death Do Us Part Peter Ulf Møller and Natasha Okhotina Lind Translated by Anna Halager Møller and Lind explore the family life of explorer Vitus Bering through his personal letters and those of his wife, Anna Christina. Born in Denmark in 1681, Bering led two historic expeditions to the Russian Far East and Alaska under the patronage of Tsar Peter the Great. His wife Anna accompanied him to Okhotsk and over a period of two months in 1739–1740, she and her husband wrote six- PETER ULF MØLLER is professor teen letters. These letters offer intimate glimpses of family of Slavic studies at the University of Aarthus, Denmark. He has relationships and the concerns of daily life, as well as insight published extensively on Russian into eighteenth-century mores. literature, culture, and history. Each letter is translated with the originals reproduced on the NaTasHA OKHOTINA is a research facing page. Also included are several lists of items brought fellow in Russian history at the by Anna Christina back to Moscow in 1742, after the death University of Copenhagan. She of her husband. These inventories tell us what items were has published works in the areas of Medieval and Early Modern considered valuable, as well as the sort of trade goods acces- Russian history. sible to early Russian settlers in the Russian Far East. ANNA HaLAGER lives in This book is number 14 in the University of Alaska Press’s Copenhagen. Her desire to Rasmuson Library Historical Translation Series. translate this book was triggered by a visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1998 and an international workshop two months later entitled “Under Vitus Bering’s Command” in Copenhagen hosted by the two authors of this book. Biography • Travel and Exploration 6 x 9, 187 pages, b&w photos and illlustrations, maps, bibliography, index Hardcover $29.95 / isbn 978-1-889963-94-5 www.uaf.edu/uapress | toll-free 1-888-252-6657 5 FALL 2008 Island Between NOW Margaret Murie IN PAPERBACK! Margaret Murie has taken on thirty-three characters, the history of a remarkable people, birds, waves, winds and bliz- zards, and has turned out a beautiful book infused with her own love of wild Alaska. —Western American Literature One day, a giant who had one foot in Siberia and one in Alaska threw a handful of rock and dirt into the water, and it remained there as an island between two great conti- nents. In this first-ever paperback edition of Island Between, Margaret Murie weaves a tale of Eskimo life on Sevuokuk, known today as St. Lawrence Island. Through the life of Toozak, a young Inuit embarking on his first year as a MARGARET MURIE had a lifelong interest in the peoples hunter, the narrative traces the experience of the people of the North. Murie grew up of Sevuokuk through the yearly cycle that defined their in interior Alaska and became lives. The story is a lively tale of love, jealousy, struggles to the first female graduate of the overcome the difficulties of daily life, a retelling of ancient, University of Alaska. She was teaching stories and of first contact with strange, white- named Distinguished Alumnus in skinned people. At first they are met with fear, then curiosity 1967, and in 1976 the University of Alaska further honored her by and friendliness, until the people of Sevuokuk realize that conferring the honorary degree of subtle changes have put their future on a very different path. Doctor of Humane Letters. Best known for her conservation efforts, Margaret Murie was also a careful researcher and an exquisite storyteller. Murie writes in her preface “so far as we know, from archaeology, recorded history, recent customs, and the personal testimony of the Island’s people, collected in Dr. Geist’s notebooks (Otto Geist, the University of Alaska’s first president), every fact, every incident, is true and actually happened at some time in the Island’s history. I have merely woven all into a narrative.” September 2008 Native American Studies • Literature 6 x 9, 238 pages, line drawings by olaus murie Paperback $21.95 / isbn 978-1-60223-035-4 6 FALL 2008 | University of Alaska Press FALL 2008 Big Game in Alaska Morgan Sherwood Written with such force and style, and exhaustively re- searched in primary documents of the period, Big Game in Alaska is certain to become a classic work in American environmental history.