pub date: November 11, 2025
5.5 x 8.5 · 192 pages
$20.95 US · $26 CAN
ISBN soft: TK
DISTRIBUTION:
1) direct from Porphyry Press
(our offset runs are printed by Friesens)
or 2) Ingram Content Group
Erica Watson
Ghosts of Distant Trees
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.
Forthcoming November 11, 2025. Subscribe and follow for updates, and preorder now.
what people are saying
“With her immersive, deeply considered essays, Erica Watson proves to be one of Alaska’s finest contemporary writers. Ghosts of Distant Trees is ‘place-based’ writing at its best, blending observation and memoir with philosophy and attitude. Anyone who wishes to know what it’s like to live at the edge of Denali National Park, or in the world today, will find Watson to be an informed and engaging storyteller.”
—Nancy Lord, former Alaska Writer Laureate and the author of Fishcamp and Early Warming
"To a visitor, 'gateway town' connotes the scenic entrance to a National Park. When you live in such a place, it's a more complicated term, as 'sublime' abuts 'mundane.' Erica Watson grew up in an NPS family and lives near Denali National Park, on Dene lands. In these insightful essays, she lays open the nuance that decades in a subculture can bring: wolves and wonder and quiet, and also abortions and elections, gravel pits and noise. 'I always find myself drawn back into the in-between areas,' Watson writes. By turns researched and intimate, questing and irreverent, Watson digs into the in-between glossed over by promotional campaigns and offers stories of living on land, among neighbors and beings, at the edge of the still-wild world. A unique and grounded voice in Alaska's vibrant non-fiction chorus."
—Christine Byl, author of Dirt Work and Lookout
“Firmly rooted in landscape and community, the essays of Erica Watson’s The Ghost of Distant Trees are wise and stunningly self aware. Watson is a sharp, unsparing observer and a penetrating thinker; literally and figuratively, she leaves no stone unturned as she travels from an Arizona girlhood to an Alaska womanhood. Watson has covered a great distance in a far country and brought back for us from that frontier the news we need to hear.”
—Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky and When We Were Birds
“Erica Watson's debut collection, Ghosts of Distant Trees, is as beautifully rendered as it is timely. Through this gathering of essays, Watson encourages readers to perceive with greater clarity while she cultivates a sense of self wholly immersed in landscape. In demonstrating an intimate understanding of place, Watson does not shy away from what is challenging, but provides us with an example to learn from as community members who exist, and resist, within late capitalism. With rich and evocative prose, Watson urges us to identify the complex relationships between the human and nonhuman and consider, then, the impact we—through the choice of action or inaction—make upon the environment around us, asking: "If, like [Wendell] Berry says, a road is laid in the wound prepared for it, is damage to a road an act of healing or further injury?" Watson's Ghosts of Distant Trees is a collection I will gratefully return to in the months and years ahead, as Watson's work exhibits both critical reflection and a grounded, radical practice of hope."
—Tara Ballard, author of House of the Night Watch
“Alaska has drawn many dreamers to its landscapes—Erica Watson among them. In these essays centered around her work in Denali National Park, she interrogates, with incisive criticism and vulnerable storytelling, the reality out from the myth. Hers is a frame that implores us to see the larger systems that have shaped and are shaping this place she now calls home alongside the intimate, sometimes contradictory details that give the park its beauty. These essays explore how climate change, political upheaval, and declining infrastructure connects us all, even in those places wrongly considered ‘distant,’ and they do so with a tenderness of attention and care toward the lands, creatures, and communities depicted. Watson wonders, ‘If mine is a love story,’ and yes, Ghosts of Distant Trees is, indeed, a love story, one that contends with the complexity, loss, and labor that comes with finding oneself entangled with something to which we know we cannot lay claim but with which we still yearn to belong.”
—Sean Enfield, author of Holy American Burnout!
about the author
APPEARANCES & EVENTS
June 9, 2025 · Denali Education Center, “Just a Visitor: Tourism & Home from Svalbard & Denali”
March 2026 · AWP in Baltimore, MD
past
June 4, 2026 · Morris Thompson Cultural & Visitors Center, Fairbanks, AK
June 3, 2025 · Denali Education Center with Annie Wenstrup and Michelle Latvala
March 2025 · AWP in LA
December 11, 2024-February 12, 2025 · Online nonfiction workshops through 49 Writers. Details
October 2-18, 2024 · Arctic Circle residency
To book Erica, contact us or her.
Erica Watson is an essayist, writing instructor, knitter, and occasional community organizer living on the boundary of Denali National Park, Alaska. Her experiences in conservation advocacy, tourism, and environmental education inform her writing, which has appeared in Terrain.org and About Place Journal, among others. She is a graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage MFA program, and a recipient of an Alaska Literary Award. Off the page, she can be found at ericarobinwatson.com, or hiking and skiing with her partner and dog.
