Alaska Story Project

Award winning author of several books, including The Only Kayak and Jimmy Bluefeather, Kim Heacox is also an opinion piece writer for The Guardian US. He’s published some 18 pieces—10 in the last year with The Guardian.

Kim: “My Guardian pieces are framed within my credo of activist writing, that it’s not only my right but my responsibility to challenge power & the prevailing order, to speak out as best I can, using story, humor and a few numbers, maybe even a little parody. Taped onto the upper right-hand corner of my laptop is a small piece of paper with this quote from Carl Sagan:”

• “Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of the planet.”

In this podcast, Kim reads two of his Guardian pieces:

• “Birds are remarkable and beautiful animals—and they’re disappearing from our world”. In the past half century, North America has lost a fourth of its birds. Earth is now a coalmine, and every wild bird is a canary.”
• “What we can learn from Rachel Carson as we fight for our planet. With her brave book Silent Spring, Carson changed the course of US environmental history. We would do well to study her example.

Host Dan Kowalski offers further context to Kim’s environmental writing by reading an excerpt from Kim’s book, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire

In his prologue, Kim writes: “The only thing that counts is that which can be counted” said Galileo 300 years before Muir. Together with René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and others, Galileo gave us our modern scientific revolution, our Age of Reason, the triumph of the rational mind. And while he and his brilliant contemporaries carried us forward, they also crushed things in our path, They separated us from nature, rather than making us participants in nature. They made us clever and powerful, but not wise.

Muir was a revolutionary of another kind; he said, there's much more to good science—and right livelihood—than connecting data and dissecting frogs. There's a deeper meaning than conventional analytical reason. Experiment is not enough. Good science also requires experience, a deep knowing and sense of wonder that comes from being out there. barefoot in the meadow, alone on the ice, naked in the storm. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” Muir would write, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Thanks musician Christian Arthur for his original compositions

Show notes: www.alaskastoryproject.com/podcasts

Spring Patterns and Surviving a Glacial Tsunami.

• Dan & Joe reflect on seasonal patterns
• Preparations for an upcoming season in Alaska
• John Muir's quest to experience a living glacier
• A story of near-death from a calving tsunami at the Dawes Glacier
• Coming close to the Big Black Wings
• Deep appreciation and motivations for sharing stories

The remote small communities—outposts in Southeast Alaska.

• Meyers Chuck, Point Baker and Port Protection, Port Alexander.
• Dan tells a Wayne Short story of man-overboard and being saved in huge seas.
• Wending their way north, stories of Tenakee Springs, and out Icy Straits to Elfin Cove.

This podcast features the work of author, editor, and teacher, and FisherPoet, Lara Messersmith-Glavin. In each essay from her recently published book, "Spirit Things", Lara holds an object or detail from her early life aboard the family's Kodiak seiner and then takes us beyond into realms of history, science and story.
In the Introduction to "Spirit Things", Lara writes, 'When we live with things, imbue them with use and care, when they become extensions of our bodies to work, to create, to touch the world, they take on their own quiet power. I like magical objects and the histories they carry inside of them."
Lara reads Chapter 4, 'Wave'

• Early Kodiak reflections of living in a liminal zone between an ever-bright sky and a dark horror of water
• "It was many years before I learned to put up barriers between myself and this terrible feeling of limitlessness."
• Norse seafarers and their use of naming and stories with which to engage the immensity of the sea
• Reflecting on modern means of navigation: charts and GPS
• Polynesian means of navigation: "This way of knowing the waves, of seeing forces that are invisible to the eye, represents an entirely different form of understanding from the charts and equipment... It was an experiential form of knowledge in which the cognitive structures are of actions and tendencies, ways of interpreting shifting conditions in the moment rather than mental maps of places or things."

Lara reads Chapter 9, "Shell"

• "When the land and the ocean meet, they speak with many voices and arrive in many moods."
• Beachcombing: "It's about being there, on the edge of the infinite, staring out into the closest thing to a straight line that nature has to offer, the water horizon."
• A story of how Lara's parents met in Kodiak and the loss, overboard, of a precious wedding ring
• Fotsam, getsam, lagan, derelict. Plastics: The Pacific Trash Vortex
• Atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, Ocean Acidification, mollusks, crustaceans
• Shells on the beach a century from now? "As with what we scavenge, what we choose to protect says so much about us, about what we value and find precious and worth rescuing."

Lara's website: https://www.queenofpirates.net
Show notes: https://www.alaskastoryproject.com/podcasts
Podcast music by Christian Arthur: https://christianarthur.com

Brendan Jones lives in Sitka, Alaska with his wife, three daughters, six chickens, and one dog. He first came to Sitka as a young man to land what work he could find. Soon he was writing for the Sitka Sentinel, and has gone on to write for a range of publications including The New York Times, the Smithsonian, GQ, Washington Post, Patagonia and others. He has recently won the 2022 Green Earth Book Award for Whispering Alaska. All the while, he balances writing with being a father and spending time in the wilds as a fisher, hunter and outdoorsman. This podcast conversation includes:

• Early days in Sitka, living in the woods, and getting hired as a reporter for the Sitka Sentinel
• Traveling west to China and around the world, west to east on little funds before returning to Columbia University
• Working as a Sitka carpenter, then returning to the East Coast to start a business
• Back to Sitka, Brendan bought the classic WW II tug, Adak
• How he met his bride as a Salsa dancing instructor
• The story of the Adak taking on water, saving it, an intervention and a rebuild in Wrangell
• With his wife, two daughters, and their dog—a year in Irkutsk, Russia, as a Fulbright scholar, teaching and researching the 19th century Russian-American Company frigate “Neva”
• The story of how the Neva met it’s end on Kruzof Island
• A reading from Brendan’s manuscript, "Americans in Siberia"
• Comments on his Washington Post article, "We Need Alaska’s Tongass National Forest Now More Than Ever". The Tongass as a carbon sequestration forest
• Comments on Brendan’s New York Times article, "A Canadian Threat to Fishing", on salmon and transboundary mining issues
• Reflections on raising a family in Sitka and Southeast Alaska

Original Music by Christian Arthur: https://christianarthur.com/

Show notes: www.alaskastoryproject.com

Brendan Jones: https://www.brendanisaacjones.com/