story structures surprise—
not in a showo=y, writing-school way but in service of
what needs to be told.
In “The Mannequin in
Soldotna,” short subtitled
sections present a layered
story of fishing hook acci-
dents, a doctor who tends
to them, and the river and
fish runs that background it
and lead to a startling con-
clusion. “Us Kids” speaks
from the plural “we” as a pack of children
tear up the country and rescue a baby eagle
from an outhouse pit while the adults drink
themselves into stupors. Back on the home-
stead, in “Point MacKenzie,” a small plane
crashes in the woods, and some of those
same kids, in alternating voices, tell of their
hungers and fears and what they find in the
snow. In “Miners and Trappers,” told in the
second person, the protagonist complies
with one of her brother’s fishing rules to
kiss a smallish salmon before releasing it:
“You aimed for the sleek slope of the cheek
plate, right in front of the first gill slit — the
high jaw — which is also your favorite part
of a man. When you met Hyde, you liked
him and tried to think why and then you
thought, ‘He has the face of a fish,’ and you
liked him even more.”
Always, the carefully observed setting
is evoked through a rightness of lan-
guage: the “shiner-eyed clouds,” stars as
“iced winks clustering over the ridgeline,”
smolt moving in the river “like a storm of
comets” while terns “swoop down with
their pitchfork tails” to scoop them up.
The beauty and the bounty of the land
live here, and the hardness: “On the
trail back, Ruby follows the plot: Woman
meets stranger in the woods. Stranger
kills woman. Or woman kills stranger.
Or start again: Woman meets stranger in
the woods. Stranger lures woman with
moose meat. Woman becomes strange. It
never ends well.”
Alaska in recent years
has experienced a surge of
well-regarded literary nonfiction, without an equivalent body of fiction. As the
writer Nick Jans has said,
“The truth is good enough
up here.” There are, however, truths that can be
best — sometimes only —
told as imaginative fiction.
We’re lucky that the fresh,
original voice of Melinda
Moustakis has arrived to speak to us from
her heart’s home.
—Nancy Lord
My Green
Manifesto
BY DAVID GESSNER
Milkweed Editions, 2011. $15, 225 pages.
lIkE MoST MAnIfESToS, David Gess-
ner’s My Green Manifesto is driven by a
desire to change our ways of seeing and
being in the world. But while Gessner is
comfortable in the role of provocateur, he is
inspired as much by his love for nature as
by his desire to save it, mak-
ing his manifesto less sancti-
monious than it is searching,
less prescriptive than it is
speculative. The book is
characterized by the kind of
humor, attentiveness, and
tolerance of uncertainty that
manifestos rarely accom-
modate. Its subtitle, Down
the Charles River in Pursuit
of a New Environmentalism,
provides a clearer sense of
Gessner’s objectives. First, it suggests the
dual structure of the book, which braids de-
scriptions of a canoe trip down the Charles
with the author’s reflections on environ-
mentalism and the ways he thinks it needs
to change. The choice of the Charles, which
most of us think of as a dirty, urban river
in eastern Massachusetts, makes clear that
Gessner has rejected a pastoral retreat nar-
rative in favor of a literary sojourn into the
urban and suburban worlds where most
readers live. Rather than celebrate wilder-
ness, Gessner’s manifesto argues for the
need to preserve and embrace the “limited
wild,” nearby places that o=er daily contact
with nature, however modest. The use of
the word pursuit alerts us that the book is
also a quest; the author is physically, emo-
tionally, and intellectually in motion as he
searches for the “new environmentalism.”
Gessner’s search is initiated by the kinds
of questions many of us find important and
troubling: How do we resist the despair
and paralysis triggered by apocalyptic envi-
ronmental scenarios, including those asso-
ciated with global climate change? How do
we balance the compelling need to fight for
nature with the perhaps even deeper need
to experience and enjoy the more-than-
human world? How do we conceive and
practice our relationship to local landscapes
in an era of global environmental crisis?
While the polemicist would simply provide
answers, Gessner helps us consider the
questions more deeply. Motivated by a con-
cern that environmentalism
has become too technocratic,
fatalistic, and divorced from
immediate contact with lo-
cal places, he proposes new
ways we might imagine and
engage the natural world.
My Green Manifesto of-
fers specific proposals for
how we might address the
problems Gessner identifies
with current environmental-
ist practice. The first of these
is to relocalize environmental engagement.
