Heartwarming tales of friendship, discovery, and finding your place in a world full of surprises.

Whimby Shines: & Stories is a collection of five stories for kids and the kid in all of us. In the title story a shorebird teams up with a star on her first migration. Three frogs help an adventurous pig discover he can swim in Kirby Buckle. On their path to becoming passionate birders, a boy and his parents experience mother nature’s highs and lows in Bird Aquarium. Empty Library is about two gifted new readers who contribute to the magic of reading, and writing, with the help of a dedicated librarian. In Our Alone Walk two rodents embark on a spiritual search for their missing friend. Themes like the value of friendship and trying new things run through the collection. Striking pen and ink illustrations were done by Dessa Thompson.

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In God Talk of the Gorge, Eric Gordon Johnson confronts growing up on the edge of Anchorage, Alaska when the State was still a Territory. “Growing up” includes his adult life. These poems revolve around the gradual realization of what it means to live in the presence of life, death and grief. Subjects include ice skating, composting, running Mount Marathon, moose, bear, dogs, geologic time, clouds and spreading ashes. Ultimately, a resolution is found in the acceptance of the world as it is given to us.

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“A profound, at times painful, homage… death makes life beautiful.”
—Sandra Wassilie, author of The Dream That Is Childhood: A Memoir in Verse

“Takes us beyond the alpenglow… to the ritual of intentional listening about what it means to be human.”
—Vivian Faith Prescott, author of The Divination of Salmon and Silty Water People

“Eric Johnson describes the Nordic landscape with intimacy, wonder, and expertise… a person who cares deeply about the people, wildlife, and places he encounters.”
—Zack Rogow, author of Irreverent Litanies and Hugging My Father’s Ghost… Read More

A celebration of the land—and a quiet call to save it.

Under the Mae West Peaks: Nature, and a Cowboy Year in a Last Wild Place follows a year of ranch life and close observation in the rugged country beneath Arizona’s Mae West Peaks. Part nature writing, part cowboy memoir, it traces the rhythms of weather, animals, work, solitude, and survival in a landscape where beauty and hardship still arrive together.

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“Perhaps the most original book about Southwestern birds, ecology, and ranching that you will ever find… a long lyrical poem to place and the power of place.”
— Sharman Apt Russell, author of Diary of a Citizen Scientist… Read More

The unforgettable true story behind one of Alaska’s most enduring tragedies.

The Last Homesteaders: Resilience and Risk at the Edge of Alaska tells the story of John and Ginger Davidson, who left the wreckage of Sixties idealism to build a life on Alaska’s remote Gulf Coast. Twenty-five sea miles from Seward, they carved out a small farm homestead under conditions many had failed to conquer: a cabin, garden, livestock, barn, workshop, and young family. All they needed was a survey to buy the land. Then August 2, 1977, brought the full force of the edge against them.

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“The Last Homesteaders by Doug Capra is a must read for anyone interested in adventure, frontier living, Alaska or revisiting the turbulent sixties and seventies in America. It is well researched and exceptionally written. A word of advice: do not speed read this book, but rather deep read it, checking out the footnotes and appendices chronologically in order to get maximum enjoyment and enrichment. Great book!”
— Jim Fredrickson

“I read The Last Homesteaders in its entirety and will do it again! I studied the maps, photographs, and history of Alaska’s pioneers, and in doing so, I became hardier, happier, and prouder to be an Alaskan. Doug Capra is one of Alaska’s finest historians, now he must surely be at the top of the list.”
— Veteran Reader… Read More

David McElroy sees a poem everywhere. In Forced Landing, his crisp lines take us with emotional force around the world in poems worth reading again and again. In Laos, he laments unexploded bombs that “…killed and wait to kill / Pathet Lao and now their grandchildren / farmers hoeing rice.” At hospice care, where his wife “is dying two feet away,” he is “…alone as a man can be / whose wife of skin and bone is sleeping / finally…” McElroy touches back down in Alaska with the title poem, where an aircraft loses power off Kodiak…and he engages in an epic struggle to survive: “I am somehow out the back door / and swimming up the blue-green gloom. / And then there is air, air everywhere. / Trees bending in a breeze over on shore…”

— Doug Pope, author of The Way to Gaamaak Cove… Read More

Where Earth and Sky Meet

John Baalke’s debut collection, Give Me an Endless Range, invites us into a realm where the seen and unseen merge. Through vivid imagery and musical language, Baalke explores how the vastness of the earth often mirrors the depths of the self. From icy Alaskan forests to sun-washed adobe, his poems offer meditations on belonging, impermanence, and the divine spark in all things. Echoing the contemplative poise of Wang Wei and Li Po, Baalke writes with both reverence and wonder. This is poetry as pilgrimage—a journey through the wild that transforms the reader’s vision, leaving the heart open, humbled, and newly awake.… Read More

It’s June, 1979, and many Alaskans are furious. President Jimmy Carter has “locked up” 100 million acres of federal lands in the state, severely limiting what can be done on them. The Kantishna Hills just west of Mt. McKinley National Park are now in a national monument, and long-established placer gold mining operations are subject to Park Service rules and oversight. However, the miners are refusing to cooperate and are angrily protesting. Equally determined environmentalists, led by the Sierra Club, are demanding that the Park Service shut down the mining.

Over the summer, tension and threats of violence in the Kantishna community increase. The story unfolds through the eyes of miners, Park Service officials, lodge operators, and visitors who are caught up in the conflict. Several of them are also dealing with personal and family issues. As they interact with each other and react to events occurring around them, they change and grow. However, the controversy over the mining remains stalemated.

Read What Other Authors Have Said about The North Face of Summer

Set in Interior Alaska in 1979, The North Face of Summer vividly portrays the clash between gold miners and environmentalists in the newly created Denali National Monument. Russell Tabbert’s story dramatizes the impact that this conflict has on the lives of an extraordinary cast of characters. It opens up a fascinating world of adventure, beauty and conflict in the shadow of North America’s highest peak.

— John Morgan, author of The Hungers of the World: New and Collected Later Poems, and The Nancy Poems

Russell Tabbert’s novel spreads itself out on the Denali landscape and covers the ground between those who work hard to extract a living from the dirt and those who seek re-creation by absorbing its natural beauty. He succeeds in showing how the space between their myopic visions is the true wilderness in which the characters have to cross. I especially enjoy how he portrays love as being vital to their survival. The North Face of Summer is a very sweet novel, entertaining, and although set nearly 50 years ago, relevant. Whenever I had to stop reading, I became anxious to step back into the Alaskan scene he brings to life.

— Dave Rowan, author of Loggers Don’t Make Love and Around the Edge of the Olympics on a Mountain Bike

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Surrounded by Weasels was compiled by Tess Gallager for Josie Gray, her companion for a quarter of a century, who told her these stories at Lake House, and before their hearth at Abbey Cottage in Ballindoon and in America at large. During the collection period, between 1994 and 2006, Josie often told stories while in motion, walking with Tess by the Morse Creek near her home in Port Angeles, Washington, riding ferryboats, and on treks to the Pacific Ocean. Shortly before his death, he recalled the many stories they had kept back from their initial book, Barnacle Soup, in 2007, and asked her to bring those together here in this book.

 

To read Josie Gray’s stores is to enter an entire human universe. Here we are brought to the very heat of a rural community populated by a cavalcade of richly realized characters — a world of turf cutters, matchmakers whiskey drinkers landed gentry fallen on hard times, fishermen, card players, conmen and chancers. As Gray tells their stories, we can imagine him sitting by the fireside, a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he brings all their quirks and foibles to vivid life. Earthy and charged with a wry humour underpinned by genuine affection for ordinary people, these yarns are replete with the poetry of plain speech, with every word needle-sharp in its precision. Surrounded by Weasels is simply a joy to read.

— Liam Carson, author of call mother a lonely field and Belfast Twilight, haiku sentry and micro-poems

 

You could make a trip to Western Ireland, traveling its backroads and by ways, hoping you might have enough great good fortune to encounter a quintessential Irish storyteller, one willing to let you listen as he works his wizardry. Or you could open this book. That stellar storyteller you seek? He’s here. Graced by the collaborative touch of the renowned poet Tess Gallagher. Josie Gray’s authentic and mesmerizing voice rises toward you from this collection’s pages. His hard-truth stories are both artless and artfully shaped, full of wit and compassion and wisdom. Read them silently or aloud to others. Hear their music. Be prepared to gladly surrender yourself to their magic.

— Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

 

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Reading Shannon Gramse’s Lost Last Poems, I found myself engaged, amused, unsettled, and haunted, pulled ever deeper into a familiar world oddly displaced from the familiar, with the offset of that strange distance changing the light so that things I already knew felt startlingly original. This is a complete and cohesive single work, not just a collection. It doesn’t let go — not even long after you put it down.

—Charles Wohlforth, author of The Fate of Nature… Read More

After her family acquired a sailboat, Larri Irene Spengler gradually realized that though their exact adventures and choices were particular to them, strands from their 18 years afloat might be useful to other people. They made regular wilderness forays from their home in Juneau, during which they became attuned to weather, gained skills and resiliency, coped with emergencies, watched whales and sunsets, read aloud to each other, and had spacious time for both conversations and silence. Taking Time conveys one way to live in the present, and to nurture together-time in the face of brimming schedules and encroaching technology. It provides a life-affirming template, whether or not you own a sailboat!

Praise for Taking Time

In this charming memoir, Taking Time, Larri Spengler joyfully narrates her family’s sailing adventures. Beginning as novices, the crew must acquire knowledge and skills: understanding wind and weather, tides and currents, navigation, safety, and being able to “live” in a cramped space. Spengler’s stories of sailing the channels, inlets, and coves of Alaska’s Inside Passage contain whimsy and mechanics, sailcloth and a recalcitrant motor, magnificent (and very close) wildlife, sudden winds and waves, and a family that learns the limits of their sailing vessel — and of themselves — where the sea is close enough to touch.

— Katie Eberhart, Cabin 135, A Memoir of Alaska

If you want to know what it is like to sail a small cruiser in Southeast Alaska, Taking Time is your guide. Larri Spengler covers it all, from stocking the galley and thriving in close quarters with her family, to surviving unexpected literal and figurative detours.

— Heather Lende, If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name

The sailboat Altariel offers a laboratory for close study of Spengler’s family — or the “ship’s company,” as they call themselves — in which everyone, regardless of age and species, bears a title: Captain, First Mate, Susan Mate, and Ship’s Dog. They are egalitarians, dividing a cookie into equal parts for all. They codify communication rules, agreeing to avoid ambiguous pronouns. And they adhere to loving family rituals like speaking (rather than singing) Happy Birthday to preserve peace for the festivity-sensitive dog. Spengler’s prose reads with joyful formality and reflects a family culture grounded at once in protocol and in play.

— Corinna Cook, Leavetakings

Southeast Alaska: a family, a sailboat, ship logs and chosen memories from 18 years of ownership. Through Larri Spengler’s lively writing, readers watch sea and shore wildlife, phosphorescent water and auroras. We experience storms, breakdowns, and repairs, and we see the family grow and develop through their years of sailing.

— Sarah Isto, Good Company: A Mining Family in Fairbanks and The Fur Farms of Alaska

You can almost smell the ocean as you read Larri Irene Spengler’s memoir of her family’s 18 years on the waters of Southeast Alaska in their Cape Dory sailboat, Altariel, exploring the passages and anchorages…accessible to them from their home in Juneau, Alaska. While some of their voyages are picture perfect sailings and anchorages, there are ones that had times of tension and distress, for example, when the shaft of their engine sheared off… Readers learn the shape of their days — exploring, fishing, boat chores, reading books aloud, and cooking. Over the passage of time, we see her daughter’s growing interest in science become her PhD thesis. In a clear writing style, Larri Spengler details time spent as a family in the midst of the overwhelming beauty of being on the water in Southeast Alaska.

— Margo W. Waring, Growing Older in This Place and Sheltering: A Covid Journey in Poetry and Prose

 

Map Designs by Noah Spengler

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