Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Alaska History > Item 343
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Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska
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by Katherine McNamara
Sales Rank: 1361579
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List Price: $15.95
$15.95
At Amazon
on 8-5-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 304 pages
Published by: Mercury House March 2001
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1562791222
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1562791223
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
Weighs: 15.4 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Abandoning her sojourn in Paris's literary culture in her late 20s, McNamara traveled to Alaska in 1976 "to learn how to live." The oil industry was ravaging Alaska's vast spaces and, together with alcohol and drugs, eroding the fundamental values of the Athabaskan people. As an itinerant poetry teacher in the school districts of Alaska's interior, McNamara both witnessed and participated in the heartbreaking efforts of these people to fend off the destruction of their culture. Rich with affectionate, precise profiles of native people and white outsiders, McNamara's story centers in part on her brief and increasingly conflicted relationship with F, a graceful and troubled Dena'ina Athabaskan man, "a warrior-hunter, taken out of time, out of place." While living in F's small village, McNamara struggled to understand the knowledge that is deeply woven into the timeless and mysterious stories that "illuminate and preserve life" and that lie at the heart of Dena'ina existence. She found that acquiring such knowledge demands attention to ordinary and meaning-laden Dena'ina protocol: eye contact or the lack thereof, the avoidance of confrontation, and the acknowledgment of the physicality and spirituality of other animals. Above all, as McNamara's "second mother," Malfa, explained, she had to pay attention to how language is used: "`We like to talk around the subject. We like to use gestures. When we talk, it's like we're dancing.'" This finely wrought, layered story makes clear that McNamara absorbed Malfa's advice and was forever changed by it. Whether writing about intimate relationships, poetry or the intricacies of village life, her approach is full of grace and equanimity.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
Narrow Road to the Deep North is the extraordinary story of a young woman's experiences among Athabascan Indians in the interior of Alaska. A poet recently returned from the salons of Paris, the author takes a job teaching in a remote region of Alaska. As she comes to know the region and its peoples-and learns to see the visible and invisible world around her-she finds herself more and more the student rather than the teacher.
Her teachers are the native people of the region, especially a lady named Malfa Ivanov, who becomes her guide into the country. Her advice: "Pay attention to what things do in our country, not what they are called in yours." As the author learns to pay attention to the world around her, she finds that the land itself holds a world of spirits and dreams.
A true story on an epic scale, charged with a unique, informed intelligence and told with a relentless realism that portrays Alaska and its people without romanticizing them, this is the moving story of a woman's path to knowledge in a remote, austere land.
Katherine McNamara is the publisher ofArchipelago, an online literary journal. Her poetry and nonfiction have been widely published in journals and reviews. She lives in Virginia.
Reader Reviews
"I wanted to learn this: how I could tell a story and tell truth" With those words poet and teacher Katherine McNamara joins her voice with those who are called to experience and ponder the sacred in an information driven age. Trained in Paris during the glory days of structural anthropology, McNamara set out in the mid 1970's to find her own "pensee sauvage" in Alaska. The great land responded by inviting her into a world which while more materially primitive than Paris displayed a far more profound emotional intelligence. In Alaska she found love, death, mystery, the great attention to the ordinary which is both the poet's burden and her gift. She saw literary culture bump heads against an older kind of storytelling, the kind of stories which teach us how to be human, the sacred stories, Akhmatova and Mandelstam stories. She writes courageously about her own lack of understanding. She wonders why we ourselves live in a culture too "advanced" to trust the ancient wisdom of dreams. A Narrow Road to the Deep North is a profound celebration of earth sacredness. We stand at a crossroads where we will either understand that the animals, the earth and ourselves to be a single organism, or we will drown in the toxic oil spill of technology and greed. That is the great tension in Alaska, both when McNamara lived there and today, when the Bush Administration wants to rip up the fragile tundra. But Narrow Road is no polemic. It is first and foremost a work of poetry. Thanks to the author for the care and courage to share it with us.
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Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska
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Price: $15.95
Updated on 8-5-2008.
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