In essays that traverse latitudes and continents, John Messick’s debut Compass Lines explores the places that shape our journeys toward belonging. From Antarctica to the Arctic, a tattoo parlor in Cambodia to an abandoned Alaska mine and beyond, this deeply felt and researched book teaches us how learning the rhythms of places we inhabit requires both movement and stillness.
Compass Lines
by John Messick
Forthcoming November 11, 2025 · preorder
Ghosts of Distant Trees
by Erica Watson
Raised by Ferns
by Maya Jewell Zeller
In this award-winning history of an isolated ghost town, bestselling Alaska author Tom Kizzia unfolds a deeply American saga of abandonment, renunciation, and renewal.
Cold Mountain Path
by Tom Kizzia
In Ghosts of Distant Trees, Erica Watson traces the layered ecologies of Denali National Park, Alaska—its vast, shifting landscape, seasonal labor rhythms, and the subtle politics of inhabitation. Through lyric and narrative essays, she explores how built environments like Denali’s single road shape encounters with land, gender, weather, and community. Turning from iconic vistas to gravel, orange peels, and garden beds, Watson asks what it might be like “to get to know a place without immediately thinking of what threatens it.” Haunted by fire and thaw, these essays resist elegy, offering instead a complex meditation on belonging, vulnerability, and the fragile intimacies that persist in a warming world. This is writing attuned to detail, disruption, and the ethics of attention.
Both a memoir arcing from poverty to privilege, and an essay collection wondering which is which, Raised by Ferns invites us to hold court with our own complicated government of selves—the ones we were, the ones we are now, the ones we hope we might someday make space for our children to become.
Forthcoming February 2026
Porphyry Press
When in doubt, err north.