Spotted in the Wild

My book Whiteout has been spotted loose in the world. A friend from elementary school posted a picture of her copy on Facebook, and to my knowledge that's the first one seen in the wild. I don't even have a copy yet! (Of course, I'm in Japan and that's the reason.) Anyway, this is exciting news! And I look forward to seeing more copies out there! Thanks, everyone, for your support.

Whiteout is Out

Although the official publication date for Whiteout is July 15th, it's actually available at the University of Chicago Press website NOW (they are distributing it for the University of Alaska, the actual publisher).

For those who don't know about it, here's a description:

Whiteout

64 pages | 6 x 9

The Alaska Literary Series

When she was a toddler, Jessica Goodfellow’s twenty-two-year-old uncle, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox Expedition to Denali, was lost in an unprecedented ten-day storm blasting winds of up to three-hundred miles per hour. Just as North America’s highest peak is so massive that it has its own distinct weather system—changeable and perilous, subject to sudden whiteout conditions—a family whose loved one is irretrievably lost has a grief so blinding and vast that it also creates its own capricious internal weather, one that lasts for generations. Whiteout is Goodfellow’s account of growing up in this unnavigable and often unspoken-of climate of bereavement.

Although her poems begin with a missing body, they are not an elegy. Instead, Goodfellow struggles with the absence of cultural ritual for the uncontainable loss of a beloved one whose body is never recovered and whose final story is unknowable. There is no solace here, no possible reconciliation. Instead, Whiteout is a defiant gaze into a storm that engulfs both the wildness of Alaska and of familial mourning.

Thanks so much for your interest and support.

Star 82

The quirky and interesting online journal Star 82 has published my first erasures from Eudora Welty's story collection The Wide Net. This journal has all kinds of interesting work, including microfiction, photography, collage and more. Check out this collage by C. B. Auder, for example. There is a treasure trove of interesting art and writing in this issue, and in back issues. Enjoy.