Alaska Story Project

Brad Matsen has been fascinated and writing about water and the ocean for over forty years.  He is the author of, "Death and Oil: A True Story of the Piper Alpha Disaster on the North Sea";  "Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King";  "Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss", a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2006;  the New York Times bestseller, "Titanic's Last Secrets";  "Planet Ocean: A Story of Life the Sea, and Dancing to the Fossil Record" with artist Ray Troll, and many more.  
Brad has written for numerous publications, was the editor of Alaska Fisherman's Journal and the Pacific Editor for National Fisherman.

In this podcast, Brad reads from his essay, "Salmon in the Trees".

• Reflecting on his lifelong relationship with water and the ocean.
• Collaborating with fish artist extraordinaire, Ray Troll, on "Shocking Fish Tales" and "Planet Ocean".
• To write about responsible stewardship of the oceans, Brad is inclined to approach it sideways, in a way that kindles reader fascination.
• As told in "Descent", Brad tells of how William Beebe pioneered field stations and was, in many respects, the first ecologist. 
• In "Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King", Brad recounts stories of working with the explorer's life and Cousteau's insatiable curiosity for ocean explorations.
• Brad recounts some of the fascinating details around his writing of "Titanic's Last Secrets".
• Brad narrates his essay, "Salmon in the Trees", originally published in "The Book of the Tongass".
• Excerpt:  'Nature is a workshop and not a temple.'
• 'The water, the forest, the people, and the salmon of the archipelago were enough to claim me.  Trollers often fish alone, catch salmon one at a time on hooks, and depend entirely upon guile, instinct, sham, trickery, and luck for success.'
• 'I remember that morning at Point Adolphus like a poker player remembers a pat hand.  The sensual feast kindled in me a new awareness of the bonds between the water, forest, and salmon of the Tongass.'

Brad shares some of his reflections at this station in life.  He also recounts a road trip with his twenty year old grandson, "Just dig how cool it is to be alive—this experience of being here!  It's astonishing.  It's really wonderful!"

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

Bruce Rettig recently published Refraction, An Arctic Memoir.  Refraction is a Pushcart prize nominee, and has received recognition and multiple awards including an award for non-fiction with the San Francisco Writing Contest, an International Chanticleer Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Award.  Bruce also writes literary short stories, creative non-fiction, essays and flash fiction/nonfiction.  He continues to be at the helm of his advertising and graphic design agency with the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association as an important client.           

Refraction recounts his experiences as a young man working in Prudhoe Bay. His writing includes both the human intensity of heavy industry as well as the vastness of the non-human world. 

• Bruce defines "Refraction" and why he chose it as the title for his memoir
• Early experiences as a new hire on the North Slope
• The complexities of a major industrial push in a harsh, demanding environment
• Remembering a couple of notable characters as co-workers, Lee and Swan
• Reads an excerpt from Refraction,  "The Dynamics of Steel and Ice"
• Relates some of the properties of arctic ice, reading an excerpt from the chapter "The Properties of Ice"
• Barter Island and the Iñupiat village of Kaktovik:   Helping recover the Crowley Prudhoe Bay fleet and getting to know some of the Kaktovik villagers
• Complexity and paradox:  decisions, choices and divergent paths:  thoughts on the fossil fuel era
• The importance of  conversation and listening:  "We all share the same home"

Show notes at https://alaskastoryproject.com
Bruce Rettig:  https://brucerettig.com/
Special thanks to Christian Arthur for his music:  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/

Dan hosts John and Becca Wolfe, co-authors of Alaska Adventure, 55 Ways, Southcentral Wilderness Explorations, published this summer by Mountaineers Books, Seattle, Washington.

This 50th anniversary edition of 55 Ways, first written by Helen Nienhueser, represents three generations of wilderness exploring and collaborative writing.  

Helen writes in the Forward:  “It gives me great pleasure that my son and granddaughter are the coauthors of this new incarnation of 55 Ways, thus continuing what has become a family project for more than fifty years. We share the pleasure of guiding you into the places we love and ask that you join us in becoming stewards of these lands, taking care of them as you use them, and leaving no trace.”

The podcast conversation includes:

• Reflections on  three generations of exploring and collaborative guidebook writing
• The unique characteristics of Southcentral Alaska, a 300 mile radius of mountains, watersheds, and coastal inlets
• John and Becca relate what’s new and exciting about this incarnation of 55 Ways
• “At the beginning of each trip entry, we provide an indication of Indigenous land:  a brief acknowledgment of the people whose lands that specific trip traverses.”
• New modes of wilderness exploration and travel, appropriate for all four seasons
• Cautions and comments about Bears and Moose
• John tells of his vision and involvement for the Alaska Huts Association
• A personal tale of wilderness adventure with both Becca and John
• Reflections on wilderness travel and exploring
• Dan reads a summation paragraph from the Preface of Alaska Adventure, 55 Ways

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

Show notes:  www. alaskastoryproject.com

Alaska Adventure, 55 Ways:  www.55waysalaska.com

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

Award-winning author and naturalist Hank Lentfer returns to the Alaska Story Project with an audio piece, “10 Sounds That Make You Feel More Alive”.

Hank reads from his book, Ravens Witness, the Alaska life of Richard K. Nelson, a passage from his earliest memories living with the Iñupiaq in the Arctic. 

“We yearn to pull together with neighbors and celebrate our collective success. So why do we find ourselves living in such rancorous times? How did stories of unity get buried by the din of voices tearing us apart? When did caring for our country become a partisan issue? And by country I don't mean a flag, song or pledge but our actual home ground the soil, rivers, forest, tundra, air and climate that make life possible.”

Reflecting on what makes a good story, “I'm drawn to stories that blur boundaries, stories that work against our tendency to cut the fabric of life into neat squares and organize it— to label people as Democrats or Republicans or evangelicals or atheist, or the world as natural or unnatural. So any story that helps stitch those squares back into their proper orientation. And a good story in my mind reveals the pain, the folly and darkness of isolation. A good story can illuminate and celebrate the restorative powers of connection. And the best stories do both.”

From a published essay, “if I were imprisoned in a windowless cell and allowed out for just one week a year, I choose seven days centered in September. I come home to my Alaska cabin in the woods and clean a few pounds of spruce needles out of my neglected kayak, oil up a fishing reel, pack a three day lunch and paddle up river.”

And finally, “Pay attention, hone in on any story that blurs boundaries or awakens us from the delusion of separateness. Retell the story at the dinner table, at church, the grocery store. And remember this you don't have to write a book or produce a podcast to be a storyteller. Our lives are stories, every decision, each interaction, the choice between generosity and greed, between gratitude agreements, kindness or callousness, tells a story. And our stories are not finished. We get to write a little each day. I try and remember that when I wake up, that the hours in front of me are a blank page and I get to choose the story I tell before I go to bed.

ASP host Dan Kowalski, “We're recording this in a time of increasing darkness for the human condition. We're in the midst of a historic shift, as a despot has unleashed mind-bending brutality and suffering on the souls of Ukrainians and also hapless Russians. The Alaska Story Project is dedicated to offer stories that have the power to connect and heal as something of a counterpoint or antidote to what's all over the news right now.”

Show notes:  www.alaskastoryproject.com/podcasts

Ray Troll's Ichthyomuse, Art and Rock & Roll

• Formative years, early influences
• Art as Ray’s childhood superpower
• Kansas to Seattle, art scene, grad school, up to Ketchikan
• Ketchikan, art scene, native culture, studio above a fish plant
• Obsessing, drawing and painting fish; 
• First T-shirt project, “Let’s spawn”
• Growing his T-shirt empire;  “Spawn ’til you Die”;  “Humpies from Hell”
• A description of Ray’s work by Brad Matsen; book projects together
• Collaboration on Planet Ocean
• We ARE fish;  all vertebrates are descendants of fish
• “How I became a Scientific Surrealist”, keynote at the Academy of Natural Sciences
• Ray’s artistic process;  phrase or pun first?
• Sketch to finished piece;  depth and complexity; adding color
• Rock & Roll & being part of a band
• Ratfish:  300 million year old living fossils
• Deep time;  perspectives on our time now
• Fossil record tells us of enduring life

A thought and theme from Wendell Berry, “coming into the peace of wild things.”

• A story from the Alaskan cabin with an astonishing encounter with a large, magnificent buck.
• Reading liner notes from a collaborative DVD project with Kurt Hoelting, ASP podcast #5.
• “Wildness is a process and not a place.  Nothing stands alone.  The environment is inside as well as outside.  The human mind is wild habitat.  Poetry is the wild edge of language.”
• An excerpt from ASP #4 with writer, editor, fisher-poet, Holly J. Hughes.
• Holly reflects on our times, her recent book, Hold Fast and reads her poem, “Credo.”
• A shout-out to contributing musician, Christian Arthur
• Gratitude for connection, health care workers, and a full embrace of this time of year.

Jonathan White is a writer, surfer, sailor and educator.  His work has been published in Orion, The Sun, Fine Homebuilding, and Natural History.  His first book, Talking on the Water, (Sierra Club, 1993),  explores creativity and the natural world.  It grew out of "Seminars Afloat" with writers Gretel Ehrlich, Ursula Le Guin, and Peter Matthiessen, along with other visionaries, activists and artists, such as poet Gary Snyder, whale biologist Roger Payne, and Gaia hypothesis co-founder Lynn Margulis.
His most recent book, Tides, The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, (Trinity University Press, 2017), takes the reader around the world to where the tide is most dramatically at play.  He goes to the arctic, Panama, Chile, Europe, China, and Alaska, among other far corners, to explore the cultural and scientific stories of the tide.  “White goes deep beneath the surface with the grace of a poet,” writes Susan Casey, author of The Wave.  “Be prepared for some serious magic when you read these pages.”

Dan and Jonathan discuss:

• Building a sloop and sailing it offshore in the Atlantic. 
• Surviving a hurricane. 
• Working with innovative theatre director and theorist, Jerzy Grotowski. 
• Founding the “Seminars Afloat” on the schooner Crusader. 
• Aground in Kalinin Bay north of Sitka. 
• Saving the boat, and returning Crusader to ship shape in three days. 
• Beginning research for Tides. 
• Discussing the science, complexity, and intrigue of tidal forces. 
• Stories from visiting the most dramatic tides. 
• Modern tidal theory:  harmonic analysis, tidal basins, resonance
• His current project in the Sea of Cortez, retracing the 1940 voyage of Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck, from which came The Log from the Sea of Cortez.