Permafrost Is an Archive

Corinna Cook is the author of the essay collection Leavetakings. Her writing appears in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow, Corinna's writing has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rasmuson Foundation, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and an Alaska Literary Award. Corinna is a graduate of Pomona College and holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. She teaches nonfiction in Alaska Pacific University's low-residency MFA program in creative writing and lives in Juneau, Alaska.

"[Cook] invites readers to join her in her process of asking questions about culture, art, Indigenous learning and northern science. The reader is challenged to make meaning right along with her. Permafrost is an Archive is, ultimately, a book of questioning and imagining, rich in metaphor and lyricism. Its many references to other texts and to cultural theory contribute significantly to understanding the North. — its past, present and future. Notes at the end add more context and sources for consideration."—Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily New "This volume is a spiritual cartography, a deep map of aching, of longing. Cook's essays chart our small human awareness as one part of geologic time, taking in spiritual, scientific, and metaphysical ways of knowing. She draws from archives and from culture-bearers. Her finely crafted essays become forms of reconciliation storytelling. Cook asserts that a shared future requires everyone to enter into right relationships with divisive histories, and then to pitch in to help carry the difficult past (and present)."—Peggy Shumaker, author of Cairn and former poet laureate of Alaska"This book follows a lineage of Alaska writers reckoning with belonging to a vast and wild place but Cook forges new ground in her unique combination of rigorous scholarship and thinking, her wry original voice, and her poetic leaps and stunning imagery."—Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Living with Wolves and Breath on a Coal

• The Photographer (a prelude)One: Distance Over Light or The Slower QuestionsThe Black SpruceDistance over LightSister Essays: The Young and the OldThe YoungThe OldSwan Signs Two: Government Documents: A Lineage of Blades or The Story of the DayAtlinPermafrost Is an ArchiveYFN 101: What We Give to One AnotherChooutla: Truth and ReconciliationGovernment Documents: A Lineage of Blades Three: The Kohklux Map or The Trails are Always ThereUnder the Bridge at Johnson's CrossingThe Kohklux MapThe Ash and the LiteratureA Triangle of SunSalsaThe End Acknowledgments