The Yukon Ice Patch Project reveals ancient lives. A road through the boreal forest reads like a map of climate upheaval. Those houses with broken doorknobs-a legacy of government regulation over Indigenous life. Corinna Cook, who was born white on Aak'w Kwaan Tlingit land in Juneau, Alaska, wrestles with the past and future into Canada's Yukon Territory. With writing that blends research and reverie, her essays ask how we might come into right relations with our most difficult, shared histories. How can we carry the past together, in a good way, as the land melts? The answers-elusive as they are-carry global resonance, taking shape through a deeply personal lens combined with careful study of local arts, artifacts, maps, and the land we depend on.
Corinna Cook is the author of the essay collection Leavetakings. Her writing appears in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow, Corinna's writing has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rasmuson Foundation, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and an Alaska Literary Award. Corinna is a graduate of Pomona College and holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. She teaches nonfiction in Alaska Pacific University's low-residency MFA program in creative writing and lives in Juneau, Alaska.
The Photographer (a prelude) One: Distance Over Light or The Slower Questions The Black Spruce Distance over Light Sister Essays: The Young and the Old The Young The Old Swan Signs Two: Government Documents: A Lineage of Blades or The Story of the Day Atlin Permafrost Is an Archive YFN 101: What We Give to One Another Chooutla: Truth and Reconciliation Government Documents: A Lineage of Blades Three: The Kohklux Map or The Trails are Always There Under the Bridge at Johnson's Crossing The Kohklux Map The Ash and the Literature A Triangle of Sun Salsa The End Acknowledgments
"This volume is a spiritual cartography, a deep map of aching, of longing. Cook's essays chart our small human awareness as one part of geologic time, taking in spiritual, scientific, and metaphysical ways of knowing. She draws from archives and from culture-bearers. Her finely crafted essays become forms of reconciliation storytelling. Cook asserts that a shared future requires everyone to enter into right relationships with divisive histories, and then to pitch in to help carry the difficult past (and present)." - Peggy Shumaker, author of Cairn and former poet laureate of Alaska
