You should tune in, Friday, if you can, to hear brief readings by each of the fellows at this residency! My cohort is wonderful. Friday from 6-7 pm Alaska time, Zoom link here.
No ephemeral flowers are blooming in this part of Alaska yet, but there’s a lot to watch and listen to. Excerpts from my spring journal and a few snaps from my travel are below.
April 15, 2026
2:30 pm
I arrived at the Safeway in Homer, Alaska, two hours ago by van from Seward; was picked up by Storyknife director Erin Coughlin Hollowell and delivered to my lovely little green cabin, where a delicious hot lunch was promptly left at the door in a basket; and began unpacking and arranging my space so that both the desk and easy chair face Kachemak Bay and the mountains. Here I am, with no idea how to wind down and enter a creative brain-space again, so I thought I’d take down notes about the last few days.
Chris and I flew from DC to Anchorage on Saturday the 11th and arrived in the evening, loopy from the four-hour time difference. The heavens promptly dropped three inches of snow, but it tapered in the morning—and Alaskans clear their roads a LOT better than Virginians do—so we went ahead and picked up our rental car. First errand, stocking up on snacks and bear spray and the pajama pants I forgot to pack. Then we hit the road for real.
It’s technically only a little over two hours from Anchorage to Seward, but we stopped for a bazillion walks and viewpoints. The first half of the journey runs between a waterway, Turnagain Arm, and craggy, snowy peaks, although the latter were obscured by low clouds. The first baby hike was the Potter’s Creek boardwalk over wetlands, where we crunched along the snowy path all by ourselves. Pine siskins, redpolls, and hairy woodpecker were making a racket, according to the Merlin app. The ducks were meditatively quiet. Most of the creek was frozen over but you could hear it gurgling away underneath. Reversing course at the end of the walkway, we saw a sign that read “trail back to parking lot” and thought cool, let’s do that. Off the wooden boards, though, the snow kept getting deeper, and there was no sign of the lot, so several minutes along, I opened my mouth to say hey, we should turn back. Instead I found myself calling, in a more urgent tone, “Moose!” There it stood amid the fringe of young trees not too far off the path. It (she?) was chewing something, not moving, but aware of me. I backed away maybe ten paces, making sure Chris had heard, then walked as fast as I am capable in several inches of snow. We were fine, fearless Chris even snapped an indistinct photo, but my heart was pounding hard.
The later stops weren’t as exciting, but there was a mostly frozen waterfall, and lots of signs reading “avalanche area, don’t stop,” which seems to me a lot like “you’re taking your life in your hands by even driving here, but staying in motion somewhat reduces your chance of death.” Once we spotted a coyote trotting fast along what I’d thought was seawater but was probably a snow-crusted mudflat. Ice floes bobbed in the open gray of Turnagain Arm.
When we hung a right onto the Kenai peninsula, we tried to head down the Whittier road toward where Portage Glacier was once visible from the highway (it’s retreated since). We knew the glacier visitor center was closed until May—April is very much pre-tourist-season in Alaska—but we’d hoped to try a short trail nearby. The weather quickly became snowier, though, and the roads dicier, so we returned to the highway. The mountains, some looking sharp as knives, loomed so high and close on both sides that you could only glimpse their peaks through the sunroof. Very different from the soft old Appalachians at home.
4:00 pm
The sun came out—I can now see the tops of (active but currently dormant) volcanoes across the bay—so I took a short walk, collecting pinecones and listening for birds. I heard golden-crowned kinglets twittering in the conifers and saw a boreal chickadee. Some stranger cries, Merlin told me, came from a bald eagle somewhere. Storyknife is a few miles outside of town, at the end of a gravel road in a sparse residential neighborhood on top of a high bluff.
8:30 pm
Still trying to record Seward even as I adjust to Homer! One highlight of the former was an afternoon wildlife cruise: the mountains and glaciers and deep hues of Resurrection Bay; bald eagles, cormorants, kittiwakes, and black-and-white ducks (common goldeneye?); a wary sea otter, harbor seal, and a few coastal mountain goats on impossible rockfaces; but most of all the colonies of steller sealions. We went to the sea life rescue center the next morning—it was nearly empty of two-legged types—and saw more of the big mammals. We spent an especially long time interacting through glass with one of them, a bull I’m sure, because he was the size of a Hyundai. He seemed intensely curious, following one of us at a time along the pane until we parked in a corner to enjoy prolonged eye contact. His giant eyeball rotated in uncanny ways, almost certainly blinking out a code I was too human to crack. The imperfect communication across worlds carried a powerful emotional charge that’s still reverberating.
The road to Exit Glacier was closed and many other trails were too icy to tackle without cleats. We did pretty well at packing warm gear, even for the winds on the prow of The Spirit of Matushka, but I must be almost a real southerner now, because packing cleats just seemed like one step too far. We tried an icy trail at Lost Lake, monitored by the gurgling and knocking of a vocal raven, but I did indeed fall on my arse (no harm done—I have padding there even without the Teletubby clothing layers). We did better among the mosses and conifers of a lake park closer to town, and on the beach at Lowell Point. As we drove along Resurrection Bay back to the hotel, a few seals swam parallel to us for a while. I love everything about their slick heads and whiskery snouts.
April 16, 2026
7:30 am
When the cabin heater kicks on it sounds like an ink jet printer. Subtle hint: get cracking, Lesley.
12:30
Someone wrote in my cabin’s guest book that the local moose is named Aurora. In May 2024, she bore twins, Boris and Alice. Almost every subsequent entry named the moose and her offspring something different.
3:15
Just back from a few errands and car tour of Homer, and the other new person and I were oriented to the facilities this morning, so this first full day felt busy. I STILL drafted a poem first thing this morning—as usual, I have no idea if it’s a keeper, but I’m glad to have leaned in faster than expected. I can already see what a release it is not to have to shop for, plan, and cook meals–it frees up a surprising amount of energy.
We saw sandhill cranes! They just returned for spring. Notes in the guest book say a porcupine used to come around, but not lately. It’s rainy this afternoon with possible snow overnight.
April 18, 2026
12:00 pm
I’ve drafted three poems now, one each morning. I’m also accumulating a windowsill full of spruce and alder cones, bits of moss and quartz, and other stray items: a rose hip, a mollusk shell, dried stalks of some kind of aster.
I hear owls at night: the deep hoots of a great horned owl, the faster, higher calls of a northern saw-whet owl. I missed some aurora activity last night, though. I gave up and went to bed at a quarter after midnight, thinking it was too cloudy, and others saw the flickering just fifteen minutes later.
Heading toward summer, Alaska, or this part of it anyway, is gaining five minutes of light a day. The sun currently sets at 9:30 but the glow lingers longer, hovering at the horizon until 10:30 or later.
Today, Saturday, is brilliantly bright, at least for now. The snow-blanketed volcanoes across Cook Inlet are perfectly clear. Directly across from my desk rises the cone of Augustine (Chu Nula, translation in progress). Visible at the edge of my view is Iliamna (Ch’nagat’in, One that stands above). I have to walk outside to see Redoubt (Bentuggezh K’enulgheli, One that has a notched forehead).
April 20, 2026
8:00 pm
Yesterday morning I pulled out all the poems I’d printed before the residency, thinking okay, now I’m ready to sequence the next book! Rereading them to sort into piles, I thought they were all terrible: half-baked, incoherent, repetitive, low stakes, full of dead brush that not even a hungry moose would nibble. Amid my panic, a sudden rush of hail battered the cabin for ten minutes, and the wind howled.
Then realized I was hungry and eating lunch might help. After nourishment, I decided to go granular. I would reenter each poem one by one, revising deeply, taking my time to diagnose and reimagine. If I couldn’t see how a book might emerge out of the mess yet, no problem—why rush anything? I was still grumpy, but I shed the panic. The sun came out and from my desk I watched a bird trying to fly against the intense north wind. It just hung in place for ages, readjusting its wings now and then, making zero headway at all until it veered off to the west.
Then, just before 4 a.m., the aurora notification pinged on my phone. I groaned but pulled all the extra layers on and trudged toward the driveway; I knew that’s where other residents had seen the northern lights before. At first I saw a cloudy glow across swaths of the clear, starry sky, but as my eyes adjusted, the glow became greener, full of dancing spikes and pillars. Storyknife sits on a bluff so the sky is very big and very dark. The aurora filled a surprising portion of it. My saw-whet owl kept sounding its alarm from over where a thin crescent moon hung, looking a little wan in comparison. I stood there by myself a while, snapping pictures randomly then putting the phone down to just bask.
I woke up late but much cheerier. Today I made some good progress on revisions.
April 22, 2026
A goddamn bald eagle just flew past my desk window, this close.
