Ghosts of Distant Trees
by Erica Watson
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.
Raised by Ferns
by Maya Jewell Zeller
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.
Compass Lines
by John Messick
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.
Cold Mountain Path
by Tom Kizzia
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.
Sky Wheels
by Mary Odden
In Sky Wheels, western Alaska’s river town histories are brought to life in Sloan, a modern fictional village that shatters and survives. An icy spring is blown apart by a too bright, too hot summer and the arrival of a faux preacher. Fire, flood, and tragedy follow. The threat or promise of a road to mineral wealth hovers over Sloan’s residents. Can a place held together by fragile commonalities and remembered histories survive this perilous 21st century? Spiked with a narrator’s nonfiction passages about sky changes and the seasonal pulse of animals, plants, and people, interlocking stories remind a cast of neighbors why they chose this place and each other, even in the face of natural and human disaster.
Porphyry Press
When in doubt, err north.