by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
Even though the population of the state is small (736,732 in a recent estimate), Alaska communities are highly diverse. One neighborhood in Anchorage, as recently reported on CNN, was cited as the most ethnically diverse census tract in America. We editors wished to reflect this diversity in the collection and sought to publish writers from the state’s many ethnic groups. In this we were only partially successful, as just a quarter of our writers identify as people of color/biracial, none of them of Alaska Native heritage. Similarly, while over a hundred languages are spoken in the state, including Spanish, Samoan, Yupik, Filipino, and Hmong, we only received a single bilingual submission, the poems of Indra Arriaga. Her work celebrates different shades of meaning in both English and Spanish.
Despite these limitations, the stories and poems in this collection traverse ethnicities, ages, genders, and sexual identities. While most of the works feature out and proud gay lives, for example Lucian Childs’s “Black Spruce” and the poetry of Amy Groshek, a few, such as Alyse Knorr’s “Fact-Checking,” Morgan Grey’s “Breakers,” and Rosemary McGuire’s tragic “Luke,” revolve around an important Red State theme: closeted secrecy.
In Alaska, the reasons for such secrecy can be very real. Though there are recently won employment and housing protections in Anchorage for LGBTQ people, elsewhere in the state there are no such provisions. Indeed, several potential contributors declined to be included in the anthology due to fear of being out in such a public capacity.
Alaska is a huge state with a wide range of ecologies and terrain. Here too our goal was to include contributors who could reflect this diversity. However, fully half of the state’s population lives in Anchorage, and the bulk of our writers live and have set their works there as well. For instance, Kate Partridge’s “Earthquake Park” and Egan Millard’s “Mondegreen,” both of which explore the complexities of life in the urban context. There are a few works, though, drawn from other areas of Alaska, such as Teresa Sundmark’s “Trespass” or the poetry of Vivian Faith Prescott and Amber Flora Thomas.
Most of the authors in this collection reside in state, though some have moved, as we Alaskans say, Outside. Zack Rogow, while not a resident, regularly travels here in his capacity as professor of creative writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The effect Alaska has on a person cannot be easily shaken. These writers continue to draw inspiration from their former home and, in turn, inspire writers in Alaska.
While we celebrate the voices of several emerging authors and poets, many of our fiction authors have been widely published: Mei Mei Evans, for example, whose novel Oil and Water was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, or Teresa Sundmark, who was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Likewise, the anthology includes notable poets who have enjoyed wider recognition, such as Elizabeth Bradfield, Vivian Faith Prescott, Amber Flora Thomas, Susanna Mishler, Alyse Knorr, and the former state writer laureate, Jerah Chadwick.
We have also included authors who work in the spoken word, such as slam poets M.C. MoHagani Magnetek and Shelby Wilson. While spoken word is not often found in conventional literary anthologies, it is an important component of Alaskan culture. Whether it be Arctic Entries, the storytelling event that regularly plays to sold-out audiences in Anchorage, or a similar Pride week event, the unique and vibrant voices of our spoken word artists help stitch together the patchwork quilt of modern Alaskan life.
While some gay anthologies only include work written by queer authors or work that strictly adheres to queer themes regardless of authorial identity, Building Fires in the Snow maintains a blended philosophy. Though nearly all of the works within the collection are by LGBTQ-identified authors, we have included powerful pieces by a couple of ally writers. We believe that a skilled heterosexual writer can speak eloquently about gay lives, the most memorable recent example being Annie Proulx, whose “Brokeback Mountain” has become canonical. Likewise, not all of the pieces explicitly address gay themes, but written as they are by gay authors and read in the context of the surrounding material, the works resonate powerfully from a gay perspective.
Some readers might expect an anthology such as this to include the genre of nonfiction. Indeed, while our state is blessed with an abundance of award-winning nonfiction writers, Alaska fiction and poetry are not as well known. This volume serves as a corrective of sorts, showcasing some of the state’s best practitioners of the imaginative literary arts. For we believe that fiction and poetry, freed as they are from a strict adherence to fact, allow readers to experience emotional truths directly.
The title of the collection, Building Fires in the Snow, speaks to the relationship we have with the land and each other. While the image of snow reflects the cold tone that many of these pieces contain, “fire” connotes both survival and passion. Moreover, the word “building” speaks to the community and love we create together. The title comes out of our unique Alaska lifestyle, where even in the cities we are free to build fires. From recreational camping to subsistence living, from urban bonfire parties to the all-too-common wilderness emergencies, sparking fires is an integral part of being Alaskan. In building fires, we keep warm; we enjoy ourselves; we survive; connected to each other and to the Great Land.
It is important to note that all the anthology’s stories and poems were written before the historic Supreme Court decision declaring marriage equality to be a fundamental constitutional right and the more recent Anchorage municipal ordinance making it illegal to discriminate in employment and housing on the grounds of gender identity or sexual orientation.
Despite these gains, LGBTQ Alaskans exist within a larger community that does not always welcome them. Several of our stories and poems speak directly to the issue of discrimination and harassment, such as M.C. MoHagani Magnetek’s “Shhh-Be-Quiet,” Teresa Sundmark’s “Worse Disasters,” and Shelby Wilson’s “Misread Signs.” This collection, then, comes at a moment of great progress, but when there is still much work to be done.
In fact, as of this writing, a group of conservative activists are attempting to qualify a ballot measure that, if passed, would repeal the recently enacted municipal gay rights ordinance. In proposing this measure, these activists offer the most antiquated of stereotypes regarding LGTBQ people. We hope the voices in this anthology will help break down these stereotypes, allowing readers to better know their LGBTQ neighbors, so that discrimination in Anchorage will continue to be a thing of the past.
Moreover, we hope this first attempt to bring together the stories of LGBTQ Alaskans will serve as an inspiration to writers we were unable to identify or who chose not to be published in this book. We look forward to future collections that feature a wider range of languages, locations and voices, in particular those of Alaska Native people.
Within the strong currents of diverse cultures and social change, Alaska’s rugged wilderness provides a unique backdrop and catalyst in the quest to live the authentic life. A life that honors the struggles and traditions of the past. A life that must be fought for anew, shared and celebrated, or, in pain and distrust, kept secret and endured alone. Unrelenting life—taking risks, carving out new understanding—showy, brave, and unruly. Life that persists, big and wild as the Great Land itself, the state of Alaska.
Martha Amore
Lucian Childs
Anchorage, Alaska
May 1, 2016
Martha Amore is a fiction writer and teaches at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her husband and three daughters. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and has been anthologized in Weathered Edge: Three Alaskan Novellas.
Lucian Childs is a short story writer who divides his time between Anchorage, Alaska, and Toronto, Ontario, where he lives with his husband. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, both in Canada and the United States.
ROSEMARY MCGUIRE
Rosemary McGuire has been working as a commercial fisherman for fourteen years, on boats fr
om San Diego to Norton Sound. She has also worked in Antarctica and in field camps across Alaska. She has traveled most of Alaska’s river systems by canoe. Her collection of short stories The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea was published by the University of Alaska Press in 2015.
Luke
The night they brought Luke’s body back to town, Pete drove out Orca to buy a net. He saw the Arcturus come into view, a black dot in the golden haze of an April night. It passed Seduction Point, heading for town, taking the shortcut because the tide was high. Its lights were so bright it was difficult to see.
He slowed to watch it coming in. Ahead, a pickup ground to a halt. The girl in the front seat was crying. As he pulled alongside, they stared at each other. A green-eyed girl in a T-shirt lettered, “Fuck me. I’m Mexican.” He didn’t know her, but he knew her face from the Reluctant Fisherman.
“You knew Luke, didn’t you?” she said.
“Kind of,” Pete said. “A while ago. We went to high school together, anyhow.”
“Did you hear about what happened?” she said.
“I heard.”
“What was it? I mean, what did you hear?”
“Just that the skipper found him in his bunk.”
She rolled the window up, her face crumpling. “I don’t know why he died,” she said.
Pete shifted up. Out Orca, the cannery loft was deserted. He dug through old gear until he found the right net and pulled it out onto a tarp. The smell of brine and creosote and winter rain rose up around him. A truck rolled in outside. He heard the rattle of the chain hoist, a pallet jack. But no one came in.
Sweat poured down his face as he worked. He was thinking of Luke, the summer they first met, skateboarding outside the library, his nimble body folding in a jump as if he could take flight at last. The rumble and grind as he fell to earth. His shout of exultation. Pete’s answering yell.
He shook the net. Let it fall at last, the last fathom out of the bag. He’d flaked all the way through without seeing it.
Two nights later, after the wake, the guys started drinking on the shore. They lit a pallet fire before the weather turned. Rain drove against the flames, hissed, and rose up again as steam, leaving the coals half-blackened with water. The same green-eyed girl with too-heavy eyeliner stood over the embers, crying.
Pete left the harbor on a falling tide. It was blowing when he dropped the hook behind Grass Island. The outgoing tide hissed over hard, gray sand. Above him, a line of boats marched up the slough, facing the current. A gillnetter he didn’t know had taken Luke’s set. He watched it as his anchor line came taut, waited to see if his boat would drag, until another gust of rain drove him inside.
Inside, the boat jerked at its line. Water splattered in the window leak. He set the drag alarm and turned down the radio. Listened to the flat, monotonous chatter of the fleet.
“Getting pretty shitty out.”
“Yep.”
“This is the Miss Becky for Trident, we’re in Pedall. Give us a holler if you need anything. We got ice and fuel.” He flicked it off.
Next morning, he made a low water set inside the bar for nothing. They killed ’em in Softuk, farther east, but the tide was down, and it seemed too shitty out to run that far. He set out by the can in a nasty wind chop and got the line in the wheel on the first try.
“Goddammit. Oh. Goddammit.” he shouted at the sea. “Fuck you, fuck you.”
Last summer, near the end of May, he’d anchored for a while on the outside beach, the night before the opener began. Luke pulled up on his way east. They side-tied their boats, listened to the slow thump, thump-thump as they rocked together in the swell. The water smooth as silk, a pure, unbreakable blue.
They watched a whale go by on the horizon, its slow progression of breaths. Pete dug through the locker looking for food. “Don’cha eat, Luke?”
“Look on your own boat.”
“There’s nothing there.” He found a half-empty jug of salsa and spilled some out on the hatch covers. “Here.” He scooped it into his mouth with a taco shell. “Tastes kinda like chips.”
“Kinda.” Luke swept up the salsa with quick sweeps of his wrist. He ate like he did everything, like there could never be enough. There’d never been a time he wasn’t there and wouldn’t be. Just Luke.
The whale, submerged, left bubbles on the surface where it had been.
The fall he and Luke were both nineteen, they took Luke’s old skiff out the bar, out Strawberry Entrance into the Gulf. It was a beautiful day. The breakers hissed quietly on the bar. The break was a long one, but they ran straight past the last taint of land and home, until they knew by the long glide of the swell that they were in the Pacific. Luke killed the motor just to listen.
They rocked slowly. A flock of birds passed.
“Murrelets,” Luke said. He always knew.
The clouds overhead formed torn white lines. The distant line of white along the beach and all the other blues spilled into each other, the blue of sky and sea and the far-off mountains.
“When we buy our boats,” Luke began, because they were both saving to buy into the gillnet fleet, and knew that that was what they’d always do; in class they’d picked out names for their boats. “Sam an’ Ella,” Luke’s was named, because of how it would sound over the radio. “When we buy our boats . . .”
But suddenly it was too much to bear, the silence and the enormous sea.
“Let’s get out of here.” Luke pulled the cord, looking for the familiar rowdy clatter that drowned out thought, preventing panic, preventing doubt.
Nothing happened.
“Fuck.” He tried again. “It should be warm.” He choked it. Checked the gas. And they were out.
He looked quickly at the bottom of the skiff; saw the gear they’d dropped in for fishing, the Pepsi cans. The slap of brown water in the bilge. No old red dented can of extra fuel. He opened his mouth. Pete’d been carrying the fuel. Pete saw in his mind where he’d set the can while adjusting his load, saw it still sitting on the shore. Looked at Luke, the fear building in their eyes. Between them the knowledge they’d gone too far.
Luke looked back at the shore, too far away. Wondered aloud what it felt like to drown.
“We ain’t gonna find out,” Pete said, to shut him up, but the words were spoken. Pete’s own voice felt hollow.
“Think they’ll miss us?”
“No.”
They weren’t expected until night. Pete’s parents had gone to Anchorage. He was staying with Luke, and Luke’s dad didn’t always come home. They looked at the shore. They were drifting out. At the horizon, where the weather would come from, if it came. Again at the floor of the skiff, and at each other.
Pete shifted very slowly in his seat. “I left it,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Luke said. “It don’t matter.” He scrabbled in the gear at his feet. Toed out a busted Styrofoam cup. “We might’s well bail. Got something we could put over to slow our drift?”
Later, they sat shoulder to shoulder on the bottom boards. Not talking much, only looking at the sea.
“How long do you think it takes?” Pete said.
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you think we go?”
“I don’t think we go anywhere at all.”
“Oh,” Pete said.
It could’ve all ended differently. But late in the afternoon, someone just happened to go past, a gillnetter early for the opener. He saw them and realized what was wrong.
“That was thinking,” he said, nodding at the sea anchor they’d rigged from a bundle of gear tied together with line. Holding the gunwale, he dragged them in over the side.
“We’da been all right,” Pete said, half-joking, giddy with relief.
That night, they walked to Luke’s father’s lodge in the dark. Got in just before dawn. Luke’s dad wasn’t there. The two of them went straight up to Luke’s bed and slept there together, holding on to each other
, without even thinking about it. Two boyish bodies molded in the night, in deep sleep. Only Pete woke up crying in the night, unable to say what he had dreamt. And felt Luke’s hand clutch in his hair, holding his head to comfort him. Luke’s stale breath whispering, you’re all right. And Luke’s hard, live kiss under the blanket. Then two of them, young bodies touching vehemently in the night.
Something they’d never done before, and never would again. Something that Pete now could not stop thinking of.
They woke the next morning, crawled separately out of bed. A distance between them they couldn’t break through. When Pete said he’d walk back to town alone, Luke looked relieved. Maybe he was afraid, as Pete was, that they would never be like other men. That this was something more than they could handle. But they never were as close after that night.
Luke started drinking harder that summer. Pete saw less of him. He thought he might’ve dated other men. But he would never know that, not for sure.
That fall after Luke died, a girl came up to see Pete. Rose. He took her to the boat when she got in. It was raining as they went down the dock. She wrapped her wet hair in her sweatshirt, leaned over, and kissed him. He felt her round, pale breasts and springy thighs. But it wasn’t as good. It was never as good again. It had none of the clarity of that night with Luke. None of the urgency.
Afterward, she lay back, looking at the photo on the wall.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“That’s Luke. He died last spring.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. Accident?” She rolled over, rubbing his stomach. He thought she meant to comfort him.
“I don’t think. But I don’t know. It could’ve been. I guess I’ll never know. The autopsy said overdose.”
“I see,” she said again. “I’m sorry.”
But she fell asleep, her back to him, the covers pulled tight around her unformed shoulders. He lay there thinking about what might’ve been. Rolled over, face into the pillow. Saw Luke so clearly. The slow contraction of his eyes, his hurried smile. The thoughts running, contradicting, in his mind. But he was gone.