pub date: late 2025
5.5 x 8.5 · 120 pages
$19.95 US · $26 CAN
ISBN soft: TK
DISTRIBUTION:
1) Ingram Content Group
2) direct from Porphyry Press
(our offset runs are printed by Friesens)
art: “In Cold Shadow” by Sara Tabbert.
Photo by Sarah Lewis
Erica Watson
Ghosts of Distant Trees
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. The road stages troubling interactions with men and dramatic weather events, and catalyzes conversations about civic values and heavy industry in national parks. Travels away from Alaska offer an opportunity to reflect on family, the privileges afforded by mobility, and the sometimes uneasy legacies of American conservation. Erica often turns her attention from the iconic landscape to the small and easily overlooked: individual pieces of road gravel, an orange peel tossed from a car window, homegrown tomatoes, a flower gone to seed. As years pass and the Denali community becomes home, her examinations of the natural world, labor, politics, gender, sexuality, and belonging gain nuance and complexity. Threaded with unsettling observations as forests burn and permafrost thaws, Ghosts of Distant Trees arrives at a place of acceptance and unease, eyes open to rapid change.
Forthcoming late 2025. Subscribe and follow for updates.
APPEARANCES & EVENTS
October 2-18, 2024 · Arctic Circle residency
To book Erica, contact us or her.
about the author
Erica Watson grew up primarily in the U.S. Southwest, in a National Park Service family. While an undergraduate studying creative writing, women’s studies, and Spanish at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she spent summers in Denali National Park, Alaska, where she eventually settled year round. Erica completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she received the Jason Wenger Award for Excellence in Writing. Her work centers climate crisis, community, politics, and land management, and has appeared in regional and national literary journals and magazines. Erica has worked in conservation, tourism, and environmental education, all of which inform her writing.
