Boardwalk Footsteps vividly revives a remote Alaska cannery’s untold stories of resilience, adventure, and love, offering an intimate glimpse into a forgotten piece of history.

Boardwalk Footsteps paints a piece of Alaskan history that could have easily been forgotten. Dot Bardarson brings Chatham, a Southeast Alaska cannery, back to life in her clearly expressed memoir giving us a chance to relive life at an off-the-grid, functional cannery. Only reachable by float plane or boat, it functioned with a hierarchy of multiple cultures working together to put salmon in cans. Dot feels privileged to have been a part of this history, recording her adventures and personal love affair, inspired by letters she wrote daily to her parents.

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Dot Bardarson began her marriage on a fish tender working as a deck hand for her husband. She arrives in Alaska with her children in the summer of 1963 when the state is only four years old. She’s there to be with her husband, Linné, now superintendent of the Chatham Cannery at Sitkoh Bay.

There she raises their children, works in the fishing industry with no cell phone or internet. She delights in the scenery, taking photographs, writing letters, observing nature with the eye of a writer and painter, and perfecting her obsession. “Art is a disease. Once you have it, there is no escape,” Dot writes.

You’ll find everything in her story from life in the cannery mess halls to the characters in the beach gang, from Fourth of July celebrations to medical emergencies, from the art of sign painting to Dot’s learning about Alaska Native culture, from her friendships with the Filipino cannery workers to guitar songfests with her musical family.

But this is more than a book about an Alaska cannery and the fishing industry. It’s also the tale of an artist’s journey, a woman and mother in a man’s world with few female companions. It’s a story about an Alaska long gone, a different world in a new state living the last days of its territorial culture. It’s about family and painting, fish and fun, the sea and its bounty.

Dot’s ghost writer, Tara Neilson enhances the story with the kind of historical research that puts personal experience into a larger context with fascinating quotes that introduce each chapter.

We’re fortunate to have these memories preserved with many photographs that bring the story to life.

— Doug Capra, author of The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords and The Last Homesteaders

Book is in color and includes photographs and artwork by Dot Bardarson

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From the introduction: There’s politics here and media criticism and slices of Alaska life — dogsled races, rodeos, trapping and hunting and fishing, and sketches of some inimitable Alaskan characters. I’ve selected the pieces for their fascination factor or humor or contemporary relevance. They frequently touch on important matters that we still struggle to clarify. So, maybe this book is a record of social examination — the political, moral, and cultural themes that we met during a particular time in our history. Or maybe it just shows the crazy doings of a crazy place. See what you think.

Praise for The Impertinent Question

“Dan’s columns for the Daily News-Miner are some of the best opinion pieces now being written anywhere…Alaska has been lucky to have had a writer of O’Neill’s integrity at work during the past several decades.”

— John Haines, Former Poet Laureate of Alaska… Read More

Shauna Potocky writes of living on the rugged coast of the northern Gulf of Alaska with the clarity of piercing cold and an illuminating light, caught most spectacularly by spindrift and sea smoke when the prevailing clouds part. She arrives as a migrant bird does but settles into the town of Seward, where she deciphers the deeper cycles of land and water that bring moments of upheaval and others of serenity. We feel the warmth of human, and sometimes canine, companionship… [through] skijoring, picking berries, bird counting, or pulling up a seat to the captain’s table. In this collection, we feel the immediacy of existence, the persistence of history, and the connections that are eternal in a spare, loving language.

— Sandra Wassilie, author of The Dream That Is Childhood: A Memoir in Verse

Shauna Potocky echoes Henry David Thoreau’s August 5, 1851 journal entry: “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” She encapsulates Thoreau’s concern in one particular poem, “All The Things We Miss Because We Did Not Look,” and evokes all the senses throughout this collection. Her poetry blends, merges and mixes land and seascapes, history, wildlife, mountains and glaciers. The specific and personal conjure up the intangible and universal forming a unity that transcends Alaska…

— Doug Capra, author of The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords, and The Last Homesteaders

 

Includes Artwork by Shauna Potocky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And artwork by Kassandra Mirosh

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In his collection Dancing Away, poet Robert M Fagen offers a constellation of reflections, from ballet barre to physics, from young dancers to old mountains, from music to the Lingít language, and from Alaska wildlife to weather, but dance is always at the core. He offers us the personal and the poignant, the universal and the quirky, with a Zen-like brevity to many of his poems. Relevant notes and a glossary of ballet terms enhance this collection, delighting and informing the curious reader.

— Susi Gregg Fowler, author of ten children’s books including Who Lives Near a Glacier? Alaska Animals in the Wild, Arctic Aesop’s Fables: Twelve Retold Tales, and Circle of Thanks

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In these spare, carefully observed poems Weltzien invites the reader on his high altitude trek through the Khumbu, noting its slate roofs and prayer flags, its moraines and icefalls, and the milky eyes of the village elders. A humble traveler, the poet treads lightly, leaving no trace and bringing us the gift of these crystalline words. “Exhale,” with Weltzien and, “drop into the mouth of the Khumbu.” This is a journey well worth taking.

— David Stevenson, two-time winner of the Banff Mountain Book Award… Read More

Judith Lethin’s tremendous spirit, love for all beings, humor, and compassion fill her memoir like a cup of communion wine. Her stories-which flow from her ‘cowgirl’ beginnings to her community service as a healer to her long devotion as “church lady” along the lower Yukon River-are infused with wisdom learned from Alaska Native elders and cultural practices, A Wonderful-Terrible God is a book about faith that is, at its heart, an exploratory and rewarding journey into the many ways of knowing.

— Nancy Lord, author of Fishcamp and Beluga Days, former Alaska Writer Laureate

A beautifully articulated memoir blending Reverend Lethin’s family history and her healing work in Alaskan villages. In her writing she pays tribute to Alaska Native Elders, past and present, showcasing their wisdom, strength and resilience. Many from Alaska will recognize their loved ones, respectfully remembered through Reverend Lethin’s writing that engages both poignancy and humor.

— Beth Ginondidoy Leonard, Research Professor of Indigenous Studies, Alaska Pacific University… Read More

The Nancy Poems celebrates a long-term marriage, beginning with the first date in 1964. It’s a love story but with complications, including a miscarriage and a child with epilepsy. After starting their family on the East Coast, the couple’s lives took a surprising turn when they moved to Alaska, and the dazzling northern landscape features in many of these poems. The portrait of Nancy and her poet husband evolves and deepens over the years as the chapbook explores their enduring relationship.

These poems are strong and full of carefully controlled feeling. They are tender and precise evocations of the moral and sensory life of man.
— Annie Dillard

Sixty years of marriage, moments tender as a butterfly appearing indoors at ten below, moments terrifying as a young son’s seizures. The Nancy Poems offer the inside story, the grief, joy, and astonishment of two people curious about one another. Cue the violas, cue the poetry. Lovely and complex, this music, these lines.
— Peggy Shumaker, Alaska State Writer Laureate 2010-2012

Morgan demonstrates that he understands the complexity and the enormous possibilities of the free-verse line. These poems are exposed, rich with affirmation, and always genuine.
— Bruce Weigl in Choice… Read More

“I opened the door and walked into this collection of poetry, immediately moved, and deeply connected to Crane’s pureness of observation through the stunning simplicity of her words. Her poems are in part a lullaby to the earth, both existential and paradoxical. Simultaneously, we are fragile and mighty, joyful and sorrowful, consumed with hope and hopelessness. Cradled in the arms of nature she hints at past lovers, imbibes the elements of the earth, her “dinner of rain,” and carries us into the impermanence of our changing world, all recognized in flashing snapshots of time. Lastly, she takes us out of the woods, and into her worldly travels navigating countries and continents with poetic flare where singular moments run the gamut from exotic to political. No matter how far she roams, Crane takes a deep dive into life and treats us to gorgeous places.”

– Monica Devine, author of Water Mask

In Mary Eliza Crane’s new collection, Last Call of the Dark, twin themes of vulnerability to the human impulse to destroy plus her resulting alienation weave through the poems. With no God for solace, she returns again and again to the natural world, animate an inanimate, for refuge. “I take comfort from a body assembled/out of microbes…an ecosystem singing from my mouth,” she declares in the opening poem, “Dry Grass,” one of the finest in the book. The music of her best poems, tight, rhythmic constructions dense with the naming of things —”salmon berry,” “Indian plumb,” “bleeding heart,” “tiger lily,” “woodpecker drumming dead oak for a mate” — hums and buzzes with life. These are brave poems by a brave poet, celebrations at the edge of the abyss.

—Peter Ludwin, author of An Altar of Tides and Gone to Gold Mountain… Read More

Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms is a book of romantic poetry. Each poem is an invitation to share a moment of openness, presence, and honesty. This is a collection grounded in the natural, crafted with care, rich with emotion, and effervescent with excerpts from a life rich with human emotion.

 

Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms takes you by the hand from the very first page, and each piece within its pages is an invitation to share in a moment of openness, presence, and honesty. This is a collection grounded in the natural, crafted with care, rich with emotion, and effervescent with the pieces of a life that make us who we are.

— Mia Vance, author of Instead of Butterflies

It begins with the title, Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms, and you know you are about to embark on a delicious journey of juxtapositions. Eric Braman’s debut is a captivating compilation of magnificent imagery that stimulates each one the reader’s senses with such vividness. From the hot sands beneath one’s feet in “Memories of Cool Waters” to the gravity of falling dirt in “Show Me Your Sadness” to the flavors in “Pomegranate Vodka,” this book reserves a piece of courageous relatability for every reader.  After all, the collection reminds us, “it took courage to arrive / it will take courage to depart.”

— Diana Ayah Alkhouli, author of Oceans & Flames and Contortionist Tongue

There is such wild beauty in Eric Braman’s debut collection of poems Bury Me in Cherry Blossoms. Reading it, you will feel as though you’ve wandered into someplace untouched, are witnessing some creature—exotic, almost endangered—show you around its natural habitat as though it had always been expecting you. Braman’s poetry is chameleon—one minute a salve for wounds, the next a hammer to both build and break, and after that a yapping puppy wanting to play. Let yourself be healed. Let yourself be broken. Let yourself know unconditional love of this poet scratching at your door.

— Eric Morago, author of Feasting on Sky and publisher of Moon Tide Press

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While still devastated by the unspeakable loss of her only son, Marian is pulled into a quagmire of grief, barely able to move at all. In that darkness she sleeps, unwilling to let go. As her first summer of loss wanes, Marian’s husband convinces her to take off alone on an ill-advised road trip to Alaska. So she begins an 8,000-mile trek from the East Cost of the US through Canada aiming for the Native village of Toksook Bay — with winter in the wings and her beloved son’s dog by her side.

Bruised and broken with unresolved grief, she is at first blind to the fact that her husband wants her out of the picture. When the fog lifts and her vision clears his tactics are revealed, and she learns that her suspicions were right on. This betrayal keeps her heading north into the icy chill of early winter. Could she stay married to a man who would blame her, gaslight her and then reel her back in?

As she works her way through the loss of every passed connection and out of the dark, new questions loom, what might Alaska offer?

 

A travelogue of grief, Out of the Dark resonates with any heart that has ever been shattered by loss or betrayal. After a tragic accident, Jeanne journeys through the worst any mother or wife might be asked to endure. A deeply moving portrait of courage, Elliott’s memoir explores how the dark night of the soul can find passage through pain to a place of radiance and hope. A touching and beautifully rendered story.

— Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan, author of A Tender Distance: Adventures Raising My Sons in Alaska, Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith, and Our Perfect Wild: Ray and Barbara Bane’s Journeys and the Fate of the Far North

A beautifully rendered hero’s journey and classic road trip story, Out of the Dark is one woman’s passage from the known to the unknown as she drives not so much as away from, but into the embrace of, a painful reality that nothing could change. Told in prose as beautiful as sunlight in a dark Alaskan January that finally finds its way above the shadowy hills, Marian Elliott’s third person memoir is a testament to the magnitude of love, the kindness of strangers, and the healing power of nature.

— Sarah Birdsall, the author of The Red Mitten, The Moonflower Route, and Wild Rivers, Wild Rose

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