Surviving the Island of Grace : A Memoir of Alaska

by Leslie Leyland Fields

• ISBN13: 9780312291402
• ISBN10: 031229140X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2002-10-17
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books

Summary

Twenty-three fishing seasons ago, Leslie Fields left her complacent life on the East Coast and traveled to the raw wilderness of Alaska. With a sparkling prose reminiscent of a Kathleen Norris or Gretel Ehrlich, Fields details her journeys in the exhausting and often brutal world of commercial salmon fishing.With an unflinching and insightful gaze, Fields explores not only the landscape and seascape of her new terrain, but the personal changes wrought by her decision to change her life: the painful transition from young woman to wife, fisherman, and mother, and, intriguingly, a new perspective on her unique childhood. A forceful combination of both the dramatic Alaska setting and the details of her own life, Surviving the Island of Grace is a poetic and powerful memoir.

Author Biography

Leslie Leyland Fields lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where she divides her time between teaching and commercial fishing. Winters she teaches English at Kodiak College and runs The Northern Pen, a professional writing business; summers, she moves out to her remote fishcamp island where she has worked with her family in commercial salmon fishing since 1978. Her five children, ranging in age from fourteen years to one, increase the island's population to seven. Much of her writing is done here in a little cabin on a dock over the Pacific Ocean.

Fields has written three other books: Out on the Deep Blue (St. Martin's Press, 2001), The Entangling Net: Alaska's Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (University of Illinois Press, 1997), and The Water Under the Fish (Trout Creek Press, 1995). Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, The Christian Science Monitor, Experiencing Nature, and others. She can be reached at [e-mail].

Table of Contents

Finding the Island	1	(18)
Stocking and Settling	19	(18)
First Pick	37	(16)
Hurled to the Shark	53	(15)
Houses, Houses	68	(11)
Falling Off the Face	79	(23)
Killing and Eating	102	(11)
Winter Travels	113	(16)
Boundaries	129	(12)
Escapes from Immobility	141	(17)
Living in the Kingdom of Clean-Enough	158	(16)
Gaining Ground and Losing	174	(14)
Looking for Language	188	(19)
An Island of Our Own	207	(10)
A House from Africa	217	(9)
Building	226	(20)
Migration	246	(8)
More than a Place of Labor	254	(17)
Oil Spill	271	(13)
Staying Ashore	284	(14)
Nursing Babies, Killing Fish	298	(15)
Between Land and Water	313