Description
The Great Land, the historical moniker of the state of Alaska, is a place of majestic beauty and vast wilderness teeming with wildlife where people still lead subsistence lifestyles. It is also a modern American state where its mainly urban citizenry busy themselves with trips to the supermarket, dinners with friends, and children s play dates. The stories and poems in “Building Fires in the Snow” offer a window into these diverse lives from the viewpoint of the state s dynamic Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning people. Rugged nature has long been thought to be the domain of white heterosexual men who pit themselves against it in order to prove their (hetero) manhood. The stories and poems in” Building Fires in the Snow” tell a different narrative, not of conquering, but of finding one s true identity through an intimacy with nature. While some works in the collection tell of wilderness survival, most relate day-to-day urban experiences lived in proximity with wild lands. Ours is a time of great change in the United States and Alaska regarding civil rights. These stories and poems capture what it is to live through such times from the heyday boom of the 1970s oil pipeline to the more recent decisions granting marriage equality and equal rights protections. Within the context of this social change, “Building Fires in the Snow” celebrates the diverse LGBTQ communities thriving in the cities and rural areas at the edge of Alaska s rugged wilderness.Martha Amore is a fiction writer who teaches writing at Alaska Pacific University and the University of Alaska Anchorage. Lucian Childs is a writer who divides his time between Anchorage and Toronto.
