One spring afternoon, while watching birds at a bog near our house, I was startled to hear the unmistakable call—congare-e-e-up—of a red-winged blackbird. This is a bird that I’d first come to know in Okefenokee Swamp, thousands of miles to the south, in Georgia. It was certainly not a resident species of interior Alaska. Yet here it was. And ever since then the redwings have appeared each spring, in that same northern bog. During the next decade, we saw the climate of Alaska continue to warm at an accelerating rate. In a very real way, the Alaska that we knew was beginning to disappear.
Meanwhile, the wildfire season increased in length and intensity. In 2004, it lasted all summer. From June through September, temperatures soared, and there was almost no precipitation. That summer, 6.3 million acres in Alaska—an area larger than the state of Vermont—went up in flames. In northern Alaska, summer is the season of endless daylight, and yet, day after day, we didn’t see the sun. The smell of smoke was omnipresent, and the air was dangerously polluted. The public was warned to limit exertion and to stay indoors as much as possible. The Red Cross set up smoke-respite centers to provide people with sanctuary from the oppressive conditions. Many fled south, in search of cleaner air. In its magnitude and intensity, that fire season dramatically surpassed all those previously recorded. But subsequent summers have come all too close to matching it.
Despite some off-putting names — like Toothache or Mold — many of these publications are beautiful and inviting, with ink-saturated pages filled with original art, and nuanced, complex stories you want to spend time digesting. Their cover prices are fittingly high, with many around $20, and a few don’t even bother to post their content online, focusing entirely on print.
Staffs tend to be tiny (often just one or two people), as do circulations (150 to 15,000). But what these titles lack in size or legacy, they make up for in originality and ambition, often zooming in on stories that have been overlooked or misrepresented in traditional magazines, and publishing them on their own terms.
I didn’t need to ask my parents whether I could have an American Girl doll to know that the answer was no. I found work-arounds. I played with my best friend’s sister’s Samantha when she wasn’t home. I pored over the catalog and made storylines out of what I saw. Each doll had her own doll, natch, and one year for my fun Channukah present, I chose the doll’s doll my parents could afford. It was a twelve-inch ragdoll which belonged to the slave character Addy. Her name was Ida Bean, she cost $18 (l’chaim!) and I loved her.
While my parents could not have afforded an American Girl doll, let alone all the paraphernalia, in 1995 the company launched a new venture that was more amenable to both their tax bracket and my family’s consumer habits: the American Girl magazine. The bimonthly magazine cost $19.95 for one year, or the bargain price of $36 for two. There is felicitous synchronicity in the fact that price tag on the one-year subscription matched the calendar year, and what a year it was (Bill Clinton! Clueless! The Rachel cut!). And so, when I was nine years old, my copies of American Girl magazine began arriving, to be hungrily read and then stacked in between my parents’ copies of The New Yorker.
After lamenting the mediocre bookstore appearance, my son-in-law gave me a brilliant idea. He told me that no one ever knows what to say to an author in a bookstore. What do you ask them? “So, you wrote a book then?” I flashed back to the time I met Carol Shields in a small bookstore in Winnipeg, just before The Stone Diaries made her famous. I turned a corner and found her perched behind a desk, squished between the stacks. Not knowing her or her work, I said, “Um, so you wrote this?”
The books were a big deal. Nobody had books on death row. They had never been allowed, and it was like someone had brought in contraband. Only six guys were allowed to join me in book club, but every guy on the row was now allowed to have two books besides the Bible in his cell. Some didn’t care, but others made calls out to family and friends to let them know they could send in a book or two. It had to be a brand-new book and be sent directly from a bookstore to the prison. It was like a whole new world opened up, and guys started talking about what books they liked. Some guys didn’t know how to read, others were real slow, almost childlike, and had never been to school beyond a few grades. Those guys didn’t know why they were on death row, and I wondered about a world that would just as soon execute a guy as treat him in a hospital or admit he wasn’t mentally capable of knowing right from wrong.