Former resident Rosemary McGuire’s third book, “Cold Latitudes,” what she calls a “a love story for a threatened place,” will be published April 15.
The book is a collection of memoir essays that detail a roughly 8-year period of travels and work in the Alaska Arctic and Antarctica—areas on the front lines of climate change that few people get to see. McGuire worked as field tech for scientific research efforts. She counted birds, measured fish and drove skiffs.
“It’s a dirty knees and cold fingers kind of a book because my primary job was always something pretty simple like catching birds or driving the boat for a whale biopsy or catching a salmon and then measuring it,” McGuire said. “In the course of this nitty, gritty work, I learned a lot about science.”
On the Antarctic Peninsula, she helped a group of researchers studying penguin chick survival. As the region warms, new species are moving into the region and harming penguin populations.
“A small question like penguin-nest survival began to paint a big picture of climate changes in the region. That was something you could see with the naked eye,” McGuire said. “I’ve been working on the Antarctic Peninsula since 2007. There are islands in places you never used to know there was land because the ice was covering the water.”
A theme that connects the essays, McGuire said, is human impact on the planet. She said she tried to write stories that provide nuance to what’s become a subject fraught with politics and culture wars. In one essay, she writes about a polar bear that was killed by hunters in self defense.
“I try to write that story in a way that wouldn’t make people go, ‘Oh those damn hunters’ or ‘Oh my god, shoot all the polar bears,’” McGuire said. “It was a difficult and nuanced story to tell but I felt like I needed to tell it. Kind of like in Haines, there’s a grizzly crawling in the window, yeah you’re going to shoot it, but there’s a deeper story about why the grizzly’s crawling in the window.”
McGuire said she’s tried to approach the cultures of people who inhabit the land with an attitude of respect, humility and curiosity.
“I was there as a learner. (My essays are about) what I saw, not to make big, all caps emotional judgments, but about what actually happened: now you think about it.”
University of Alaska Press is the book’s publisher. McGuire also wrote a memoir, “Rough Crossing,” about her experiences working on commercial fishing boats, and a collection of short stories “The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea.”