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 late 2025
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
Combining narrative and lyric essays, this collection reckons with coming of age in a warming world, invoking humor, ecological grief, and social commentary. When Erica Watson arrives at Denali National Park, Alaska as a college student, she encounters an expansive, dynamic landscape, and a community shaped by seasonal fluctuations of a tourism economy and subarctic latitude. Erica interrogates the social and logistical roles of the lone road transecting the park and other aspects of the built and natural environments.
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 early 2026
Porphyry Press
When in doubt, err north.