Mary Odden
Sky Wheels
In Sky Wheels, a novel set in roadless northern Alaska, a small town struggles with natural and human disaster. Sloan, a fictional amalgam of actual remote communities, has become the locus of accelerated climate change, where catastrophic fire and flood arrive in the same season.
Sloan’s icy spring is blown apart by a too bright, too hot summer and the arrival of a faux preacher with cloaked intentions. Fire, flood, and tragic deaths follow. The threat or promise of a road to its mineral wealth hovers over residents. Can a place held together by rivers and remembered stories survive this perilous 21st century?
A wry grandmother insisting she will die at home, a Dene Vietnam veteran with secrets, and an agnostic nun seeking answers from an old mission all narrate Sloan’s past and present. A voice of the town itself ranges over actual sky changes, history, and the pulse of animals and plants woven into rural lives. The Sloan Journal chronicles changes in Alaska’s actual north while participating in the creation of the fictional story and its quirky characters, offering a hybrid inside/outside view of this northern place.
The town of Sloan is inspired by outposts planted by Russian and American commercial ventures, subsequent trade and religious missions, mining, and World War II airfield construction. As people of the remote north gathered around schools and money-based economies supported by river and air travel, cultural diversity and dislocations became the norm. The title, Sky Wheels, points at turning seasons, cycles of history and told stories, airplanes, aspirations of teachers and missionaries, and the swinging arc of one summer’s light.
Sky Wheels’ vivid characters compel with humor even as they draw readers into questions that cannot easily be answered. How do we live when extraordinary tragedies accumulate around us? How do we understand people who intend evil? Where can we live and where do we belong? These questions live with us and are as open as the future we hope to have.
Forthcoming April 13, 2027. Preorders will open early 2027.
If you’re an author interested in blurbing or reviewing Sky Wheels, get in touch, and stay tuned here to learn what early readers make of Mary Odden’s debut work of fiction.
pub date: April 13, 2027
5.5 x 8.5 · 416 pages
$24.95 US · $35 CAN
ISBN soft: 979-8-9974896-0-1
DISTRIBUTION:
1) Ingram Content Group
2) direct from Porphyry Press
(Friesens prints our offset runs)
"Odden does it at the highest level."
—Foreword Reviews
what people say about Mary Odden’s prior book, a memoir in essays called Mostly Water (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press)
“Mary Odden's authentic, profound, and original Mostly Water will thaw parts of you you didn't even know had frozen. Love, work, animals, food, music: were we to disappear, humanity could be remade of the ingredients here set forth by this remarkable writer. Suffused with wonder, steeped in memory, and written in exquisitely musical prose, the essays in this book serve to harmonize head with heart in a way that can only be called wisdom.”
—Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House and Love & Fury
“Alaskan Mary Odden proves to be an exceptional writer, offering up portraits of the people and places that have shaped her wise and loving view of the world.”
—Nancy Lord, author of pH: A Novel and Let Them Tell You
“Mary Odden’s essays are a wonder. I don’t know what I enjoy most about them, whether it is the clear-eyed re-creation of people and places, the rich music of her language or—and maybe this is where I take the deepest pleasure as I read—those astounding paragraphs where Mary turns to her readers and offers all the gathered insights and ideas her essays have to share. At such moments, I am dazzled by a person of genius who can lead me out into fresh and surprising turns of thought.”
— Frank Soos, author of Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions
about the author
APPEARANCES
To book Mary, contact us or her.
Mary Odden grew up in eastern Oregon where she worked as a fire lookout and dispatcher. She followed wildfires north to spend most of the last forty years in Alaska: telling smokejumpers where to go, finding true love, digging gardens, playing dance music, living in roadless and rural communities, and listening to stories. She worked as a writing teacher and village teen counselor in southwest Alaska and, for a few busy years, published and edited a small community newspaper in the Copper River Valley. A graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks MFA program, she won a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and an Alaska Literary Award. Odden’s essays and articles have appeared in The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Alaska Magazine, Edible Alaska, and About Place Journal. Her memoir in essays, Mostly Water: Reflections Rural and North, was published in June 2020 by Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Upcountry Cranberry, a book of recipes, poems, and stories about the wild lingonberry, or lowbush cranberry, was published in 2024. She lives in Nelchina, Alaska with husband Jim and exquisite dog du jour, Britta.