Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones.
Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She's at work on Genesis, Quetzal, a book of poems set in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press.
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Peggy Shumaker Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand
Alaska seems like a place where rich history and ancient culture meet what we tend to call modern culture in visible and tangible ways, a theme that is explored in many of your poems. I love the glimpses of local cultures appearing in your poems, and I’m really curious to know what it’s like to live in a place where ancient cultures are still present and intersecting with energy and environmental concerns, and what hybrid cultures have emerged. In what ways have you noticed this meeting of cultures and interests affects cultures that have been in Alaska for many generations? (I don’t mean this question to be an indictment of any side of a political issue; I’m from West Virginia, which has been negotiating similar issues for centuries and I understand that these issues are very complex.)
I'm glad you savor the local & cultural glimpses my poems offer. Thanks~
Every human culture in Alaska has come here searching. The people who likely walked over the Bering Land Bridge no doubt wanted reliable sources of food. They may have been fleeing enemies. They might have wanted to satisfy their curiosity about what lay "on the other side."
Later arrivals came with enormous ambitions: Russian greed for furs nearly wiped out otters and seals. Russians enslaved native hunters and forced them to deplete sea lion and walrus populations. Many nations' greed for whale oil and baleen nearly wiped out some kinds of whales. Missionaries' desire to convert people was in large part responsible for the diminishment of languages, songs, dances, oral histories, rituals, and traditional ways of knowing. Contact with outsiders also meant contact with horrible diseases. In some villages, only a few people survived. Rapid and intense cultural upheaval and disruption of subsistence activities meant that many people starved—both literally and figuratively. At the time of contact, people in Alaska spoke 42 distinct languages. Now, maybe six will exist outside of archives. That's a huge, unfathomable loss.
I've just been reading Pierre Berton's book The Klondike Fever, about the complete mania that surrounded the discovery of gold in Canada and Alaska. Over 100,000 people uprooted their lives and headed into unknown territory, most of them completely unprepared. Scurvy, freezing, and starvation awaited the vast majority.
Oil brought a whole new rush to Alaska. Building the pipeline meant that governmental agencies had to have the right to cross native lands. So people had to sort out who had rights to what. One result was the imposition of corporate structures on communities that up till then had lived largely through subsistence. Some Alaskan native corporations now are among the wealthiest in the state. But not all.
Only one per cent of land in Alaska is in private hands. The feds control vast areas. The state does too. Native corporations, the Mental Health Lands Trust, borough and local governments all control some areas. Land Grants to the university (under negotiation since before statehood) remain unsettled.
As you said, it's complicated.
Energy is on everyone's mind around here. Opinions run the full gamut.
Think about our options, in our very harsh climate. When we need to heat our homes (at 40 or 50 or 60 below), the sun might shine for three or four hours per day. There's no wind generating equipment that people have been able to maintain at those extremes. Our rivers stay frozen for seven or eight months per year. Some people heat with wood, but we have severe particulate pollution from the ones who don't dry their wood or keep their burners clean. So we struggle—like many communities. In Fairbanks, heating costs are very high. In rural villages, heating costs are terrible. People suffer.
We think about energy a lot at our house. My husband's family runs the only commercial coal mine in Alaska. The coal it produces generates electricity at many power plants in Interior Alaska. Through careful planning and the tremendous effort of four generations of employees, they've provided an affordable, reliable source of fuel since the 1940s. To have people demonize Alaska's low-sulfur coal hurts. To have people from outside Alaska lump all miners with those who do great damage to people and land hurts too. We live here. We care about using resources wisely. We care about communities, about families, about everyone's grandchildren.
What is one of your most memorable and/or rewarding teaching experiences?
I've been teaching since 1976, so I've been privileged to spend many years of my life with writers trying to stretch and grow. I've worked with all ages, all levels of experience.
Marvelously talented Alaskan writers who were once my students and are now writing friends include
Gerri Brightwell
David Crouse
Seth Kantner
Natalie Kusz
Eva Saulitis
Nicole Stellon-O'Donnell
Sherry Simpson
and many more!
You seem to frequently fly with your husband and travel quite a bit as a writer, too. What is your favorite way to travel?
My beloved Joe flies a 1943 Grumman Widgeon, a great old workhorse of an airplane. We take off from the gravel ski strip in Fairbanks, fold up the gear, and land on the belly of the aircraft on Walker Lake in the Brooks Range. It's a part of the world most people never see—above the Arctic Circle. I savor the Arrigetch Peaks, the Gates of the Arctic National Park.
I read on a social networking site that you were asked to join an “old guy” and a lawyer in helping a gold miner clean up the riffles in his sluice box. How did that turn out?
The mine site was in the hills a few hours from town. Turned out that it took a backhoe and three young guys with big muscles to pull the riffles up. We stayed out of their way. Then we all screened the big stuff and washed off the astro turf carpets where the gold snags. We caught the concentrates in plastic 55 gallon barrels that had been cut in half lengthwise. We brought the concentrates back to Fairbanks and ran them through another smaller sluice, and picked out the gold—some in small nuggets, some in flakes, some in specks. The placer miner pulled out a little over 200 ounces of washed gold (about 85% gold—the rest quartz and other material).
Most of placer mining is icy, hard, back-breaking work. Just the little bit we did gave me great admiration for the miners and no desire to pursue this myself.
What are you most proud of doing as Alaska’s Writer Laureate, and what do you have planned? What does your position entail? In what ways should we encourage the reading and writing of poetry in our communities? What successes have you seen in this regard?
I've started the Alaskan Writers Directory, to help writers around our vast state find one another, and to help sponsors of literary events (in Alaska and Outside) know that we exist.
I've begun editing the Alaska Literary Series at the University of Alaska Press. Our first three titles will come out in spring 2012.
Via Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press, I'm publishing fine art and literature from Alaska. www.borealbooks.org
I've had the privilege of traveling widely in Alaska, meeting writers of all ages and backgrounds. It's heartening to know that we're all out there looking for the right words!
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ATTU, 1942
From our homes they took
sealskins, otter pelts, masks.
Baskets woven from slim grasses
bowed by salt air.
From our homes
they took axes, saws, tools
they could use to tear down
our homes. They burned
ulus and fish racks, handmade
flensing blades in bone handles.
Our homes. They gave us
time to hunt
nothing, to gather
nothing. And so we arrived
on board ship shivering
and wet, our parkas
back home on their pegs.
We did time in boxes
whose boards barely parted
ice winds, our youngest
and eldest the first
to travel alone
the long way home.
SUSTENANCE
If Kachemak Bay eats away at the beach
while we drive the arched brow of the spit
if glaciers gouge new valleys
where grizzlies impale
salmon midleap
if otters gnaw fishheads
under creosote pilings
if salt on our lips we have tasted before
if kite flyers fall straight-bodied back,
if hard wind pops them up
if breakers carry in every curl
memories of their lives as ice
if spruce beetles' appetites brown
forests to firewood
if each bite we take from the living
what then
from our hands
with our bodies
with our words
shall we nourish?
FOSSILS
Sometime between now and
thirty-five million years ago
this coal seam
up Suntrana Creek
caught fire on its own,
baked layers
above and below
rust and raspberry
clay crumbling
friable down the slide.
What fell here, preserved—
delicate
ancient branches
reaching,
wide grasses'
flower-ends spreading—
handlebar mustaches
incised, intact.
One tree long gone let go
this leaf, serrated edge
sharp even now. Umbilical
bump where stem held
to twig. Intricate veins—
clear maps,
so many paths
to the fractured edge.
VIGIL
The cow moose on the far bank
cranks her head back
over her shoulder,
frozen. Carved there, stone,
she holds up
snow tumbling over her,
defining her withers,
her rump, her spine.
Steady, her eyes.
Eyes of a mother
who every day wonders
mother who will never know
how exactly
death came
for her son,
son so far gone
his mind whiteout,
ice in his blood,
blizzard
up his nose.
Her nose hairs frost
as cold breaths thin.
This season's calf
moseys, kicks
ankle-deep
powder
across the river
then postholes
between birch.
Disappears.
Only then
does his mother
turn.
ALIVE
How many centuries
for ivory to mellow,
fossil carved
two thousand years ago
by hands these colors—
walrus hide, seal oil.
driftwood, smoke.
As the carver spoke
to the stone, this woman
emerged, heavy-eyed,
bemused, the corner
of her mouth tipped up
as if she knew
a secret
she's still not telling.
What wore away
her baby's face?
Water maybe or wind
or the constant caress
of weather-worn
fingers in a shaman's pouch.
How odd now
to regard her
on display,
spot-lit,
even the shadows
she casts
compelling.
Hello across centuries, woman
of Okvik. Thank you, carver
from Punuk Island. Though your bones
and the bones
of your babies turned
fossils long before
anyone here blinked,
you live.