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Articles by Christine Byl
The Great Outdoors
Featured Selections A few days ago, while visiting family, I was lucky enough to take a walk through snowy woods and along ice-rimmed streams, enjoying the pristine beauty of the winter landscape. It made me think of Heather Swan’s essay “Keening for the Cailleach,” a meditation about the “miracle” of skating on frozen lakes in the Midwest. The impulse to immerse ourselves in natural spaces is strong (even when it’s freezing out!), and you’ll find it in other pieces in our February issue as well.
The Making of a Trail: Curry to K'esugi Ridge Connector | Outdoor Explorer
Paul Twardock is a Professor of Outdoor Studies at Alaska Pacific University, where he has worked since 1988. He is the author of Kayaking and Camping in Prince William Sound and help found the Alaska Sea Kayaking Symposium/Paddle Sport Fun Day. At APU he teaches a variety of undergraduate classes included Sea Kayaking, Recreation Program Design, Nordic Skiing, The Business of Recreation, and Wildland Ecosystems and Human Impacts.
Debra Earling's 'Lost Journals of Sacajewea' wins Montana Book Award Original
The winner of the 2023 Montana Book Award is in. Debra Magpie Earling’s novel, “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea” took the annual prize, which was announced on Monday along with four honor books. Earling published the novel, written in the form of an imagined diary, last year on Milkweed Editions. The news release said the book “challenges prevailing historical narratives” around the Lemhi Shoshone woman and member of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery.
Here are our book reviewers’ favorite selections of 2023
Anchorage Daily News book reviewers Nancy Lord and David James present, in no particular order, the 2023 works that they found most memorable and meaningful. Their lists include novels, memoirs, mysteries and histories as well as tales about boats, sled dogs and polar explorations. 2023 was, without a doubt, a very good year for books related to Alaska and the north, and choosing favorites from among them is a humbling assignment.
The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Shortlist Announced
Hearty congratulations to the shortlisted authors of the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize. Chosen from a longlist of twenty-five debut novels published in the U.S. this calendar year, the seven titles (and authors!) listed below will be celebrated at the Center’s First Novel Fête on December 1. The winner will be announced on December 5 at the Center for Fiction’s Annual Awards Benefit.
The Complicated West
Lookout by Christine Byl Strange Object | 2023 | 300 pages Near the beginning of Christine Byl’s Lookout, nine-year-old Cody Kinzler has been goaded by a young neighbor into striking matches, and one singes her shirtsleeve. When her parents find out, her father takes her to a meadow, waters down a perimeter, and lights the grass inside it until waist-high flames come close enough to make her cry and dry her tears.
Book review: Alaskan’s debut novel, rich in detail, takes on the West with insight and compassion
“Lookout” By Christine Byl; A Strange Object/Deep Vellum, 2023; 278 pages; $25.95. Alaskan Christine Byl, author of the well-loved 2013 “Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods,” has returned with her first novel, “Lookout,” a beautifully written and deeply compassionate story of a rural family in northwest Montana. Beginning in 1985, the story follows the Kinzler family, the neighboring family of close friends, and others through intertwined lives of love and loss for the following 24 years.
Outdoor Books for Outdoor People (Updated for 2023)
Happy National Reading Month! It’s time to share my list of outdoor books again. In March 2020 I shared this list for the first time and I’ve updated it each of the past two years. Now, I’m adding forty-six books that I read in 2022. How exactly did this list come about? In January 2005, I decided to start keeping a list of every book that I read.
Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, March 17, 2023
Latest News This week's issue runs the gamut from Happily: A Personal History--with Fairy Tales, a "bubbling cauldron filled with ingredients as diverse as parenting and premonitions, mythological creatures and marriage" by Paris Review columnist Sabrina Orah Mark, to Julie Gerstenblatt's "engrossing" debut novel, Daughters of Nantucket, which explores the options for women--white and Black--in the mid-19th century, to Death and Croissants, an "absurd, laugh-out-loud caper" featuring a B&B...
Christine Byl: Hardcover: 9781646052295: Powell's Books
by Christine Byl Release Date: 3/15/2023 Upcoming Event Christine Byl’s Lookout (A Strange Object) tells the story of the Kinzlers, a complex working-class family firmly rooted in northwestern Montana. Josiah and Margaret Kinzler have forged an unusual bond marked by both tenderness and distance; their daughters, Cody and Louisa, grow up watching their parents navigate what it means to be true to yourself and what that costs.
The Top 66 Events in Portland This Week: Mar 13-19, 2023
Best Things To Do SZA, Everybody Reads 2023, and More Top Picks Like 0 SZA might have just killer her ex...how'd she get here?! Venues may have health guidelines in place—we advise directly checking the specific protocols for an event before heading out.
Two Poems by Melissa Kwasny
Owl Nest They get active in evening, my friend says, and tuck inside if it rains. It isn’t raining, but the air is cool as emeralds. We stand in our down coats, pointing our binoculars at the broken-off, jagged slopes atop the giant ruin that is the tree. “Dear Outside World,” one of my students writes, “all I can see from my window are the animals in my backyard and the bushes that form a periphery. I think this might be all you are for now.” An owlet risks the open and stares myopically.
Letter to America by Christine Byl
Pledge July 4, 2022 On this, the first Independence Day of my life thus far1 on which I have less rights—am less free—than the year before: I pledge allegiance to the freak flag, my banner I dare let fly in the face of sycophants. I pledge allegiance to the fags, the bag ladies, the ragamuffins.
10 Must-Read Books Set In Alaska
These 10 must-read books set in Alaska include bestselling fiction and engrossing nonfiction. You will want to place these books that take place in Alaska on your TBR list. 1. Alaska by James A. Michener “In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A. Michener guides us through Alaska’s fierce terrain and history, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling present.” 2.
When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers Edited by Susan Fox Rogers
Cornell University Press | 2020 | 304 pages When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers is a collection of 26 essays that work at the intersection of environmental and literary sensibilities. Edited by Susan Fox Rogers, the volume offers wonder and companionship at a moment when our own species is grounded during a pandemic, as well as timely dispatches from an avian world under threat.
Wrack Line | Terrain.org
The sun paves on the waves a glinting path to a far horizon. I grew up on Lake Michigan beaches. Dirty bare feet spiked with dune grass thorns, the rhythmic thud of waves. My home is in the Far North, now, but I still return to Michigan, for reunion or retreat, to the dunes where my parents now live. On the lake, November sidles up: darker days, cloudy skies. I nestle in to think and read and wander.
Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
1. In the High Sierra, her first time sleeping in a tent, my friend Pilar from Barcelona is terrified. She is afraid of bears. She wipes toothpaste from the corners of her mouth, tucks her hair into the hood of her sleeping bag, and cinches it against cool alpine air. She stares at the nylon ceiling. She lies still as a log, attuned to any noise outside. All night she hears it—rustle rustle—a bear in the bushes, edging closer to her, closer. She freezes. Holds her breath. The noise stops. She relaxes.
Every Reason To Stay
Writer and marine biologist Eva Saulitis spent decades recording whale songs, but before that, she almost became a professional oboist. She was born in upstate New York to Latvian immigrants whose peasant culture — brown bread and folk tunes — shaped Saulitis’s childhood. In 1981 she went to Northwestern University in Chicago on a music scholarship.
Matthew Komatsu | Danger Close Alaska 2020
Editor’s Note: Danger Close Alaska 2020 takes place Saturday, March 7 from 11 AM–3 PM at the Anchorage Community House. Danger Close is open to the public. Registration is just $10 for members of the military, active duty, retired, reserve, and families. If you’ve participated in any of our four previous Danger Close seasons, then you’ve probably heard me talk about how every year, we do something different.
Dog Years · National Parks Conservation Association
To a hiker, a trail is a possibility. To a bear, a trail is a path of least resistance. To a child, a trail is an adventure. To a runner, a trail is a workout. To a historian, a trail is a story. And to a traildog, a trail is paycheck, commute, office, passion. A trail is the whole, entire point. If you’ve hiked in a national park, you may have seen us. We’re spread along the trail working on rock steps, tools lying just out of your way.
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