Rough Crossing

Born on a homestead outside Fairbanks, Alaska, Rosemary McGuire worked for fifteen years as a commercial fisherwoman and has traveled most of Alaska’s river systems by canoe. Currently she is a research technician in the Arctic. Her book of short stories, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea, was published in 2015.

“Rough Crossing: An Alaskan Fisherwoman’s Memoir is worth the price of admission for its stellar prose alone. With lean, forward-moving sentences and a keen eye for essential detail, Rosemary McGuire captures the Alaskan seascape and the nearly unrelenting toil of fishing its dangerous waters so fully that I felt as immersed in the experience as if I were reading Hemingway. But the protagonist here is a young woman, who does not yet know that ‘running away to sea is always about what you run from, a life that seems to have lost its color,’ and it is this running that pulls this already compelling story into the deeper waters of the universal. This is a superb memoir.”—Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog