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.

New Book News

I am thankful and excited to announce that Whiteout, the manuscript about my uncle who died climbing Denali, the manuscript I've been working on for the past few years, will be published by the University of Alaska Press in July 2017.

This is the perfect fit of press and manuscript--the people a the University of Alaska understand so well the background incidents and accidents that this book is based on, and have firsthand knowledge of the climate and weather that made the storm that devastated the expedition--I couldn't be more grateful to Peggy Shumaker, Amy Simpson, Laura Walker, Krista West, and everyone else over at the press who have helped me along this process.

Stay tuned for developments.