The view from my front door...

 

The owls arrive on winter 

wings, with messages we can't

decipher, watching us

with steady yellow eyes 

as if 

they know something

not at all

human.

Oh! This reminds me of Nancy White Carlstrom's wonderful book, so quintessentially Alaskan: Goodbye Geese illustrated by Ed Young, a book that should never have gone out of print:

...When geese spread their wings in the sky

and fly honking south,

winter hears

and winter comes.

Goodbye

Goodbye

Goodbye

Geese.

Yes, winter is here at the top of the world where we are all happy to welcome its pristine whiteness, its healing silence.

The connection lies between stories, across cultures . . .

…and my husband tells the stories; I’m only the scribe. This is what I tell people, anyhow, and the people who know us understand what I mean. It’s not entirely true, of course. I’m more than a scribe. I’m a writer, after all, which means that my work, even when it includes all the stories I’ve heard throughout my life, is still, in aggregate, me. George’s stories are now my stories, too. His extraordinary tales, especially those which fall outside of the frame of reference of my birth culture, are true. This is the spirit in which he tells them and it is the spirit in which I receive them.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he couldn’t write his stories until he saw them the way his grandmother saw them, as completely natural. I get this. I straddle a cultural line in my writing and for me, that line is erased by the stories. As soon as my words hit the page, though, I understand that for some people, the line remains and will always remain. Sitting on the edge of it, I sometimes think it’s my job to translate, from one side to the other, but it’s not true. My job is to write across that line as though it’s not there and let others negotiate it as best they can—hoping that for them, too, the line is erased. 

George says the English language is backwards and that the Inupiat, in learning to understand English, had to learn to think backwards. So the impetus for the post is at the end—backwards, perhaps, but I will get there. Read on.

I think of stories, of these astonishing and unbelievable stories and the way George tells them and I am reminded of the character of Edward Bloom, in the movie Big Fish, who lies on his death bed, telling his life story to his son. “Most men will tell you a story straight through. It won’t be complicated, but it won’t be interesting, either,” Bloom says. I always cry at that point at the end of the movie, where the characters we had assumed were Bloom’s inventions, all show up at his funeral, to honor him. The power of story.  

George’s stories are like that. A geologist by training, he says the world has seen seven ice ages. His evidence comes from all over the place, from some wild places, in fact, but his primary source is oral history passed on from generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation as story. 

It’s where I start my new book, My Name is Not Easy:

The elders say the earth has turned over seven times, pole to pole, north to south.

Freezing and thawing, freezing and thawing,

flipping over and tearing apart.

Changing everything.

We were there.

We were always there.

They say no one survived the ice age but they’re wrong.

There were seven ice ages and we survived.

We survived them all . . .

I think of ice ages and I think of global warming and, from an entirely personal and probably insignificant level, the idea scares me: what will become of the people indigenous to the Arctic when the ice melts? What will become of all the Arctic expertise, contained in the language, when the Arctic is gone? It feels like a death too deep to fathom--but George laughs: it’s happened before and will happen again. The earth turns over, he says, and it takes three days for the migratory animals, the birds, the whales, to make shift. The people who know how to, will survive. The knowledge will transfer.

This, in fact, is the impetus for this post, the place were this small story of mine starts: 

I am scrolling through Facebook and someone has posted a video. It speaks directly to the stories George has always told in that way that makes me catch my breath, makes me sit up and say: yes, all things are connected; I’ve always known it. There is no line to straddle; the lines are all connections and connection is forged through story...

Here's the video, make of it what you will:

The end of the American Dream...

I'm a writer and like every writer I am also a voracious reader. In other words, I love libraries. I'm also a school board president and when I think of it, the link between education, libraries, reading and writing is so obvious it hardly seems worthy of comment.  What I have never been able to understand, though, is why so many people fail to make a connection between reading and librarians, the kind of librarians who generate an excitement for books that turns kids into lifelong readers and learners.

I've seen a lot of great librarians in my day but as the economy leads us to look deeper and deeper for budget cuts, school districts across the country are cutting librarians at an alarming rate. It feels like we're on a big ship headed for disaster and no one is able to change the course. Some of us keep running for the steering wheel but a whole bunch of people are blocking the way--good people faced with hard choices. The argument seems to be, "better a librarian than a teacher." To me, that's like saying "better I lose my lungs than lose my heart." You need both to survive. A library without a librarian is just an empty shell. I know, I've walked through a lot of empty libraries in recent years. Kids don't live there any longer and reading doesn't happen in them. I think National Book Award finalist Kathleen Duey says it rather nicely:

"As long as six years ago, speaking/appearing in schools, I began to hear about librarians being fired. Schools with no trained librarians became the norm in some states--or there might be one librarian serving 6-10 schools, spending half the day driving.   EDUCATION is being gutted to meet budget cuts. Really? Do we want to create a low wage-earning underclass? Because this is how you do it. You make education--even a self-guided/public library education like my own-- harder and harder for people of limited means. You take away the level playing field of good public education. You let the universities charge fees very few can afford. This dismantling of public education and public libraries is underway and growing. And it is the the worst betrayal of the American Dream I can imagine. "

Read Kathleen's blog HERE.

 Anyone who doubts the connection between librarians and reading scores might also be interested in this study:  Something to Shout About: New research shows that more librarians means higher reading scores. Food for serious thought, I'd say.

A Wedding in the Mountains

August 27, a perfect day for a wedding in Anaktuvuk Pass. The tundra was gold and red and glorious, the sun was shining, and the sky promised to go on forever and ever.

Reverend Mary Ann Warden flew in from Kaktovik for the wedding. Payuk, Isabel and our Josie were united.

Two families became one: the Edwardsons and the Nays.

Cakes, niqipiaq, good company...

 

...and a new son!  

In the end, we took argos up into the mountains for a bonfire in the setting sun and the next morning we flew home, through mountains full of caribou and sheep, our bags bursting with berries and paniktaq. Quyanaqpak to our new ilas!

photos by Nasugrak.

 photo by Debby

Starting Backwards, or random memories of the newest book

Six a.m. on an otherwise beautiful day in Anchorage. George is still sleeping. I wake up early, ready to work, but when I turn on the computer and open the file, I discover I've saved one of the chapters of this book--a book I've been working on for an embarrassingly long time--under the same file name as the entire 245 page manuscript.

After a moment of hyperventilation, I remember I had saved an earlier version at the end of the previous month. I’ve only lost a few weeks’ worth of work. I'll survive. 

We’re staying at Hickle House, which is part of Providence Hospital, a peaceful place nestled in the woods and crowned by mountains with decks outside and a fireplace within. It’s a place for healing, which is why we’re here.  George has had a season of medivacs,  emergency rooms and surgery. We need healing.

He sleeps in an easy chair at the end of the bed where I work, his breathing still labored. I go to work recreating one of the chapters of this book, one I had been especially happy with.

I still remember the structure of it—a rather nice balancing act of conversation and memory, strung along a narrow wire of action that seemed to work. I can recreate it. But writing is a process full of serendipity and as I set about, in the still darkened room, to rewrite something I thought was good, I find something better.
 
There’s a lesson in this, I imagine.

George wakes with a start. He’s had a nightmare. He was trying to save something—he didn’t know what it was but whatever it was, he was about to lose it.

I tell him about the file lost on the computer. He laughs and says, “Are we really that connected?”

I nod. Yep.

Working with him asleep beside me always stirs my memory, somehow, tapping into those subconscious stores that enable me to write stories that are both his stories and mine. Like this one, My Name is Not Easy. 

Perhaps it is just the way a writer’s mind works, but for me, everything is connected.

First there is the connection of being at Providence, Anchorage’s Catholic hospital, because George grew up in a parochial boarding school, the school that started this story.

And then there’s a connection in being at Hickle House because Hickle was the Governor of Alaska when the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act was born. The Interior Department had put a freeze on state lands until Alaska Native claims were settled and Hickle opposed it. Oil had been discovered in Pudhoe Bay and the state wanted it-all of it. 

And there’s also, suddenly, a connection with the TV, which George has just turned on: Mel Gibson, as Maverick saying, “It’s their fault for being on our land before we got here.”

All of these things fit into this book somehow, trust me.

Normally when we come to Anchorage for medical visits we go to the Alaska Native Medical Center, but not this time. This time I transferred George from ANMC to Providence. ANMC had tried and failed at the surgery and they wanted to try again. I refused to give them a second chance. He was drugged and didn’t know what was going on. He thought I was being difficult--and it was hard moving away from ANMC, a place, so full of friends and family and familiar faces. Harder still as the last nurse there treated him like a national treasure and the one before that—a gentle Indian from the lower 48—had braided his long gray hair with such loving reverence that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he would not react well to seeing his hair in braids.

Providence was scary at first. No Native faces. No wonderful Native artwork. A tiny sterile room. Then the nurse came in—a veteran Catholic nurse who knew George’s favorite nun from Copper Valley School, the nun who used to cook the rabbits he caught in the woods near Glenellen.

And now, here we are, recovering at Hickle House and eating chicken instead of rabbits. Hickle’s gone and the Catholics saved the day, this time, and I saved my book, so life is good.

George reaches over and pulls the curtain open.

“Hello Anchorage,” he says.

“Hello,” I answer, my voice falsetto. 

“You don’t look like Anchorage,” he says. “You look like Barrow.”

“In your dreams,” I tell him and we both laugh.

The Birth of a Book . . .

The cover of my new book is up on Amazon! This is a book born of the stories my husband tells of his years away at boarding school, a book born, as well, of who I am as a writer and as a human being. It was a book I knew I had to write. It will be released in October so it's time to start preparing for the birth. I will be blogging from time to time to document the journey.  For now, the blurbs are in and I am thrilled. 

From William L. Iggigruk Hensley, author of the wonderful Fifty Miles from Tomorrow:

Debby Edwardson’s “My Name is Not Easy” brought me to tears as I remembered the loneliness and confusion when I left home for boarding school thousands of miles from my home and family in Arctic Alaska.   This young adult novel evokes a time and place in the Alaska Native world that is important to remember—when far off governments and powerful institutions made decisions that began to change our world—and the adjustments we had to make to survive.  It is an excellent work of fiction with important truths to be remembered. 

And from award-winning children's writer and poet Helen Frost:    

We think of the Civil Rights Movement as something that happened in the south, but here is a book from the far north that shows a different, and equally important, side of it.  In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been an unbearably dark and difficult story, but Debby Dahl Edwardson brings to it such deep love and intelligence that the reader experiences not only the anger and tears of these memorable characters, but also their joy and ultimate triumph. The words soar off the page and then, beautifully, bring us home.

And this one, from my dear mentor Ellen Levine:

My Name Is Not Easy, Debby Dahl Edwardson has given us an extraordinary tale of love, betrayal, and above all, survival, as a group of young Alaskan Natives are transplanted from their home villages to a parochial boarding school in the Alaskan wilderness.  Through their stories, Edwardson reminds us that the landscape we see is also the landscape of our soul, whether arctic tundra or urban canyons.  This is a novel that, like landscape, marks a reader’s soul forever.

Of course one expects something good from a friend and mentor. It's like your mother--they have to say something nice. But this one is from someone I have never met, talked to or even emailed. A wonderful surprise from National Book Award nominee Howard Norman: 

One of the rewards of a work of literature as imitable, haunting, and deftly composed as My Name Is Not Easy, is that it permanently takes up residence in one’s life.  Debby Edwardson writes with perfect verisimilitude.  The cultures of First Peoples in Alaska makes me think of the French poet Eduoard saying, "There is another world, but it is in this one."  Tough minded, full of hardscrabble humor, My Name is Not Easy is old-fashioned storytelling that – with fierce love and first-hand knowledge -- brings beautiful, harrowing, courageous lives along the arctic ocean to readers. This book deserves all great good fortunes.

Oh do let's hope he's right!


BREAKING NEWS: My Name is Not Easy has been picked up by the Junior Library Guild!

Snow Day in the Arctic

Is this a redundancy? Sure, we get lots of snow in the arctic--even full-blown blizzards--but we rarely get snow days. When a blizzard arrives with winds gusting up to 40 mph, however, visibility is reduced to zero, the roads are annihilated and everything shuts down. Even the planes, our only connection with the outside world, have quit flying.

And I love it! The snow envelopes one in a way that feels almost holy. We reconnect with our loved ones, freed from the burdon of all those important responsibilities that suddenly become meaningless with no means of outlet. Think of it as a retreat, a naturally induced retreat. Like hibernation. I've always compared the dark of an arctic winter to hibernation. And believe me, hibernation is a great thing for one who has burnt up major stores of energy frolicking in the midnight sun. Even more so for those past the age of frolicking.

Ah well, at least we still have our gas heat and electricity.  At times like this I think fondly of the wealth of coal we have stored beneath the house. And then, in the next breath, I consider the fact we have nothing to burn it in. Perhaps I should research coal-burning stoves on the Internet. 

At least we still have the internet! Which affords me my laugh of the day:

I'm teaching an online course in Alaska Native/Native American Children's Literature through Ilisagvik College and one of my students  (a teacher in Atqasuk, a small, remote village) posted a message today about doing a class project where the kids re-interpreted Winnie the Pooh for reader's theater, setting it in arctic Alaska. All the animals became arctic animals except for Eeyore, who became, appropriately, "an animal that was brought to Atqasuk and never got a flight home."

Hey it could happen to any of us. It happened to me over 30 years ago. But then, I am not Eeyore.  

The essential question of the day is this: when fate keeps you locked inside your den in the arctic, how will you respond?

I'll just write my way out.

Oh wait, what about the electricity? Should I worry? Check my stock of paper and pens, you say? Write the old way? Never! Now you have truly crossed the line....

On a clear day you can see forever . . .

This, however, is not a clear day. This is my driveway, 30 minutes ago. No, that's not the car, silly. That is randomly drifted snow. No--wait--my husband is correcting me: snow does not drift randomly. Snow drifts very specifically and you will most certainly want to understand exactly what this means and how it works as a navigational aide when you find yourself lost on the tundra on a day like this.