Items related to Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska

Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska - Hardcover

 
9780312291402: Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska
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Reminiscent of the best of Matthiessen, Dillard, and Erlich, Leslie Leyland Fields's Alaskan memoir is an inspiring narrative of life in the wild.

Surviving the Island of Grace is a beautiful and haunting memoir of a woman who left the East Coast and moved to Alaska looking for a new life. In brilliant prose, Leslie Fields tells her story of adapting to life on a wilderness island without running water, telephones, or other 20th century conveniences. Here, as a 20-year-old newlywed, she is immersed into the world of commercial salmon fishing. With an unflinching gaze, she explores the extremes that define her new life: the beauty and brutality of commercial fishing, the startling land and seascape around her, the isolation, the physical labor, the intensity of communal island life. Among these extremes, she must find her way from a young woman to wife, commercial fisherwoman, and mother. She explores as well, perhaps most eloquently of all, her unique New Hampshire childhood and its role in preparing her for her life in the bush.

With its dramatic Alaskan setting and moving narrative, Surviving the Island of Grace is a poetic and powerful book.

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About the Author:
LESLIE LEYLAND FIELDS is a writer, national speaker, workshop leader and professional editor who lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska in the winter and Harvester Island in the summer, where she works in commercial salmon fishing with her family. (Follow her weekly blogs from these islands at leslieleylandfields.com). She has written/edited 9 nonfiction books of memoir and essays on a variety of subjects: the spirituality of food, wilderness, forgiveness, commercial fishing, and parenting. Her forthcoming book is "Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers" (Jan. 2014, Thomas Nelson).
Leslie is also a contributing editor to Christianity Today magazine and writes for Books and Culture and other journals. She loves to travel, and spent several years trekking around the world. She still travels often, leaving Kodiak to speak at conferences, churches, retreats, and universities around the country. In September 2013, she is beginning a new venture, the Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop at her remote fish camp island off Kodiak Island. (leslieleylandfields.com/p/harvester-island.html) 

She holds three graduate degrees in Creative Nonfiction, English and Journalism, and has taught for many years in both undergraduate and graduate programs in Oregon, Alaska and Washington and now continues to teach through college visits, writer-in-residencies, frequent radio appearances, speaking, and her professional writing business, The Northern Pen. 

Leslie and her husband Duncan have 6 children, a daughter and 5 sons, all of whom work in salmon fishing every summer. She can be reached at leslieleylandfields@gmail.com
From Publishers Weekly:
Readers with pioneer envy will get vicarious thrills from this high-energy memoir. With a keen eye for detail including the occasional stomach-turning description of dead marine life Fields delivers the lowdown on 23 years of commercial salmon fishing on a remote island off Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. In the summer of 1978, Fields, an East Coast literary type, gamely followed her fiance, Duncan, to his family's generations-old fish camp, where she was unceremoniously ushered into her new workplace: 42-degree water. Fields's unflinching descriptions of spending her first winter eight miles (by water) from the nearest human being and telephone (shared by 100 people) are enough to make the most diehard hermit yearn for company. Of the miserable inconveniences of daily life, she writes, "The first time I did laundry here, I cried. Secretly. And only after putting eight loads of grimy clothes and fish-fouled jeans through the same marinade of mud sloshing in a wringer washer that only partially worked... I knew only two basic categories [before] then: clean and dirty, black and white. [This] seemed a horrible perversion of both the symbol and reality of laundering." The only parts of this memoir that readers may question involve cameo appearances by Duncan, Fields's workaholic, emotionally distant husband, who ushers her back to the skiff 20 minutes after she has a miscarriage. Given her gutsy, capable spirit, it's surprising that our intrepid narrator never follows through on her threat to walk away. Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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  • PublisherThomas Dunne Books
  • Publication date2002
  • ISBN 10 031229140X
  • ISBN 13 9780312291402
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages352
  • Rating

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