Surviving the Island of Grace: A Life on the Wild Edge of America

Leslie Leyland Fields

Jan 2008 · Epicenter Press

About this ebook

Reminiscent of the best of Matthiessen, Dillard, and Erlich, Leslie Leyland Fields's Alaskan memoir is an inspiring narrative of life in the wild.
Surviving the Island of Grace is a beautiful and haunting memoir of a woman who left the East Coast and moved to Alaska looking for a new life. In brilliant prose, Leslie Fields tells her story of adapting to life on a wilderness island without running water, telephones, or other 20th century conveniences. Here, as a 20-year-old newlywed, she is immersed into the world of commercial salmon fishing. With an unflinching gaze, she explores the extremes that define her new life: the beauty and brutality of commercial fishing, the startling land and seascape around her, the isolation, the physical labor, the intensity of communal island life. Among these extremes, she must find her way from a young woman to wife, commercial fisherwoman, and mother. She explores as well, perhaps most eloquently of all, her unique New Hampshire childhood and its role in preparing her for her life in the bush.
With its dramatic Alaskan setting and moving narrative, Surviving the Island of Grace is a poetic and powerful book.

About the author

A resident of Kodiak, Alaska, Leslie Leyland Fields is a wife, mother of six, commercial fisher, world traveler, writer, editor, and teacher of creative nonfiction in Seattle Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts Program. For more information, visit www.leslieleylandfields.com. Leslie is the author of seven books including The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God (Waterbrook Press, div. of Random House) Surprise Child (Waterbrook Press, div. of Random House), Surviving the Island of Grace (Thomas Dunne), Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Oceans They Fish (St. Martin's), The Entangling Net: Alaska's Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (Univ. of Illinois Press), and The Water Under Fish (Trout Creek Press). Her books have been reviewed in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, The Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated for Women, The Portland Oregonian, The Seattle Times, Women and Health, the Utne Reader, Oregon Review, and many others. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Best Essays Northwest, Christianity Today, It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, America and the Sea: A Maritime History, and many others. Her poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, the Bellingham Review, the Northern Review, Patches of Godlight: Father Tim's Favorite Quotes, and many more.