Dark Winter Nights is a live show and podcast based in Fairbanks that showcases true stories from Alaska.
An excerpt from the novel Lost Mountain by Anne Coray, inspired by the real life proposed Pebble Mine.
Michael Engelhard recounts the story of taking a raven with a broken wing to a vet, and the woman he met during the act.
Alyssa London was the first person of Tlingit descent to be crowned Miss Alaska USA and went on to found a media production company.
Nick Jans on living in Alaska, the stories that emerge from that lifestyle, and sharing with them with Alaska magazine readers.
Mary Odden reflects on her life in the forest. The forest and humanity’s part in it is constantly in flux, but the rythym of splitting wood is dependable.
Alaska Native elder stories are preserved through the Tanana Chiefs Conferece video series, Legacy of our Elders, which profiles elders in 30-minute videos.
By picking up hitchhikers on the Alaska Highway, Tom Walker has met the Archduke of Lithuania and a man with a namesake river.
(fiction) In my youthful self, I imagined the sea was a basket of treasures. All things that came from it were delights to my eyes or thrilled my mouth or woke my skin. When my sister and I set out foraging, I always suggested the sea’s edge, while she liked best the woods and mountains. I tried to be patient, but her need for dabbled shadows and high views ignored my need to flow and ebb, to breathe with the waves, to throw on changeling colors with a caprice of mood. I loved my sister, yet if I listened deeply to the chambers of my heart, I loved the sea more. Until I met Whale. Then I loved him best. My story never would have happened if I had been born a man, for then I would have met Whale as danger or as prey. I would…
Learning from a tree To understand the black spruce, remember it grows from a fist-sized root ball as grey and compact and crucial as a brain. Each black spruce spindles itself straight up into the crack of the cold, stout branches making a skyward scrub from base to apex all winter night. And below that brain of roots lies permafrost, even in summer. This, then, is a tree that keeps ice in mind. I remember meeting black spruce during my move from southeast Alaska to the interior. I was ill at the time, a fjordlands creature with an immune system gone haywire, taking temporary leave from the rainforest and a sabbatical from the whole glaciated coast against which my fevers flared. I went inland, aiming for semi-arid, boreal-forested Fairbanks, where I hoped to find a kind of medicine. It was end-summer when I went, fall-not-winter. The road north took me…
