Fishcamp Life on an Alaskan Shore / Edition 1

by Nancy Lord

Overview

For the past eighteen summers, Nancy Lord and her partner Ken have made a living, and made a life, fishing for salmon off the west side of Cook Inlet on the southern coast of Alaska. In Fishcamp, Lord provides a nuanced and engrossing portrait of their days and months in camp at the inlet.

Nancy Lord celebrates a great good place--Cook Inlet, Alaska, where she and her partner have made a life together for more than twenty years. With poetic cadence and magical tone, Lord writes of her life from June to August, days filled with the mending of nets, the muscle-wrenching labor of the catch, the exquisite pleasure of an improvised hot-tub, and the often subtle beauty of the inlet's flora and fauna.Woven throughout Lord's adventures is the deeper history of the region's stories and legends of the native Denaina people; anecdotes about past and current residents; and descriptions of their neighbors, both human and animal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582430706
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/16/2000
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nancy Lord lives in Homer, Alaska. From her many years of commercial salmon fishing and, later, work as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships, she's explored in both fiction and nonfiction the myths and realities of life in the north.

Among her published books are three collections of short stories and five works of literary nonfiction, including the memoir Fishcamp, the cautionary Beluga Days, and the front-lines story of climate change, Early Warming. Lord was honored as Alaska Writer Laureate for 2008-10, a term during which she traveled throughout the state to promote Alaska writers, writing, and libraries.

What People are Saying About This

Tom Bodett

Tom Bodett

Nancy Lord is a twenty-first century Thoreau, only with more common sense and estrogen.

Sue Halpern

If you ever dreamed of chucking it all to become a fisherman in Alaska, Fishcamp will make your dreams more vivid.

Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer

These pages teem with provocative ideas about wild country, its uncertain place in the world, and the way landscape can shape a life...[Lord] is a wonderful writer, and this is a terrific book.

Editorial Reviews

Lord and her partner, Ken, first saw Cook Inlet in southwestern Alaska in 1978. Having taken up residence in a nearby town, they bought an abandoned fish camp on the shore of the inlet. They have lived there five months a year ever since, earning a precarious living as salmon fishermen, keeping what fish they need to eat and selling the rest to a cannery. Written in quiet, unadorned language, Lord's book about their experiences is like a large fish stew, with all manner of fascinating information about bears, fish, birds, insects, plants and trees tossed in along with slower-moving accounts of mending nets and putting boats up for the winter. Professional environmentalists will be interested in the struggle for a share in the salmon catch among subsistence fisherfolk, the commercial fishing industry and sports fishermen (the lowest of the low, in the Lords' view). Geologists will be intrigued by the changes in the earth still taking place after the great earthquake of 1964. But the purpose of Lord's contemplative book is to share her belief in the interconnectedness of all things: as she sums it up, "everything has a life of its own, but nothing lives by itself." A map or two would have been a helpful addition. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Lord and her partner, Ken, have owned a fishcamp in Alaska since 1978. Every spring, they make their way from the village in which they winter to the shoreline where they spend the summer fishing for salmon. This is Lord's account of her fishing life, which she loves and writes about with emotion, wit, and intelligence. The best passages include her depiction of her time alone when Ken goes to run a fish tender; a tale of a beached, dead beluga whale; and her anecdotes about George, a nearly deaf neighbor from up the beach. Occasionally, Lord is condescending toward suburbanites and city dwellers. Fortunately, these passages are infrequent, and one cannot help but admire Lord's determination to find her right place and live the life she wants. Readers who have enjoyed Dan Schueler's A Handmade Wilderness (LJ 2/15/96) or Jennifer Ackerman's Notes from the Shore (LJ 4/15/95) will welcome this book. Recommended for most natural history collections.Randy Dykhuis, Michigan Lib. Consortium, Lansing

Library Journal