Reading & Conversation: Family Matters
featuring Susan Pope and Kate Troll
Recorded Thursday, September 26, 2024
Kate Troll is an author, op-ed columnist, wilderness adventurer, and speaker on conservation and climate issues. Her opinion pieces have been published in the Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Nation. For three years she was a regular columnist for Alaska’s only statewide paper. In 2017, Kate published a creative nonfiction book that combined wilderness adventure stories with lessons and insights about sustainability and climate change. Her book, The Great Unconformity, Reflections on Hope in an Imperiled World, led to her being invited as faculty at the Chuckanut Writer’s Conference in Bellingham, Washington.
Susan Pope’s life has been shaped by growing up in the wild terrain of Alaska. Mountains, rivers, glaciers, oceans. These form the settings for her stories about family, nature, and the rapidly changing landscape of her homeland. In her memoir, she follows the threads that bind five generations of her family to Alaska.
Yet, she also succumbs to the lure of faraway places—Africa, Bhutan, South America, the desert Southwest. With humor, humility, and courage she confronts the challenges and disappointments of motherhood and grandmother-hood, her fear of heights and drowning, the secrets of a found diary, a crumbling family legacy, and more.
Susan earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and communication from the University of Washington, a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the University of Alaska Anchorage, and a Ph.D. in human and organization development from the Fielding Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. She has worked as a family counselor, educator, organizational consultant, curriculum developer, child welfare researcher, and freelance writer. She finds joy in books, writing, exploring wild places near and far from home, and spending time with family and friends. She lives with her husband in Anchorage, Alaska.
Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, The Southeast Review Online, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Under the Gum Tree, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, Writers’ Workshop Review, Alaska Magazine, Deep Wild, HerStry, Canary, and Burningword Literary Review, among others.