For the last few years, I’ve been conflicted about something integral to fiction: writing characters with different backgrounds and experiences from me. I am white, and though I now live in Alaska, my family has deep roots in the south. I have benefited in pretty major and obvious ways from white privilege. I don’t want […]
Mary Catharine Martin | On Writing Characters Who Don’t Look Like You Read More »
I recently finished Tales of Burning Love, by Louise Erdrich. The book centers around a man named Jack Mauser, the women who love or have loved him, and their families. Jack is a womanizer—a woman-lover, one might say, as he approaches all his encounters with as pure a heart as a womanizer could. One of his (successive) wives is
When I was in third grade, I wrote a short story about a young girl and her family fleeing Earth because giant, intelligent cockroaches were taking over the world. Our class sat on the rug around our teacher, Mrs. Braaten, as she read the first page out loud, yelling the dialogue attributed to the cockroaches; I had handwritten their
Mary Catharine Martin cooks dinner along the Nisutlin River in the Yukon in September 2014. (Photo: Bjorn Dihle) Six years ago this summer, I hiked up Juneau’s Granite Creek Basin with my partner Bjorn, looking for berries. It was my first season of gathering in Alaska, and everything about it was thrilling. Red, yellow, and
In the last few months, Alaska has been brutal to people I know. A friend who’s so knowledgeable about the wilderness he teaches college classes on the subject got mauled by a bear on a mountain outside Haines. The outdoors-savvy boyfriend of a friend disappeared while running or hiking outside Nome. A bush pilot I
