Juneau Author Corinna Cook is heading to the Chilkat Valley this week for an event centered on her newest book, Permafrost Is An Archive And Other Inheritances From The Alaska-Yukon Borderlands.  Cook, whose writing blends research and personal reflection, sat down with the Chilkat Valley News’ Rashah McChesney to talk more about the collection. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Rashah McChesney: Your essays move between reporting, memoir, philosophy, and literary criticism. What kind of reading experience are you trying to create for someone picking up this book for the first time?

Corrina Cook: I write in the tradition of the essay. I think that one thing that essayists are really involved in is trying to define what is an essay. We don’t agree. But what we do agree on is that an essay involves movement. The way that I teach it to my students is that an essay is always in motion between the three poles of research, lived experience and reflection. 

The research is anything we learn from outside of the body’s senses, and then personal experience is our lived life, and then reflection involves the movement of the mind. So, my interest in that form has everything to do with that sense of movement. In my perfect world, I’d like a reader to have a chance to think a thought that she hasn’t thought before…and also potentially rub up against questions that are not easy. 

One thing that I was really struck by is that a lot of nonfiction about climate change focuses on catastrophe or policy. Your work often seems more interested in memory, relationship, and meaning. I’m curious why you approach climate change in that way? 

I sometimes describe my interests as like, I’m interested in social problems with a geologic sense of time. I see a lot of exciting innovation in terms of climate grief adaptation coming out of the arts. 

I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have activists in it, I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have like policymakers in it. I want good attorneys making strong legal arguments on climate. But I also don’t think that arena is the only option, especially in this part of the north. 

Part of our colonial reality is that we’ve got these very local specific changes that our small communities and families and neighbors have to live with and have to figure out how to live with and at the same time are relying on federal powers, federal decision makers in very far away lands, on the other side of the continent. I just find that disconnect really fascinating. Someone will be making policy somewhere but, you know, in fjord country we’re seeing landslides and increased rainfall and decreased returns in salmon runs and how do we, in our small communities, find good enough ways of living with that kind of complicated loss that those changes entail? 

The title Permafrost Is an Archive treats land almost like a living record keeper. I am so curious what drew you to that metaphor?

Yeah, I was talking with a permafrost scientist, the director of Yukon University’s permafrost research lab. He made, to me, the very poetic and interesting point that ice and humans come into the land together. When you look at geologic epochs and this massive cooling event that happens on earth, it coincides with the evolution of Homo sapiens. So, this permafrost scientist told me that ice is a record of basically all of humanity so it’s very interesting that globally so much ice is melting. That’s like, our species’ most core library. So, I’m just very swept up in the kinship that implies between ice and the human animal. 

The Alaska-Yukon borderlands are central to this collection. I wonder if this region reveals anything to the north that outsiders often miss. 

I think of the drawing of borders up here as extremely strange. I think that might be a, kind of, basic answer to the question. It’s very weird that we have a line along the mountains and that on one side our neighbors have a Canadian healthcare system to contend with and on the other side of the mountains the neighbors have an American healthcare system to contend with. That’s just a surprising thing about the border. 

I think also there’s a lot of exchange and connection across these northern coast mountains. That goes very easily into geologic time, the accretionary belt of North America certainly doesn’t stop at the Alaska-Canada border. So kind of like the way that all of these jumbled bedrocks have landed in North America in the first place, that crosses the border. Then we have these generations and generations of kinship and trade ties, people walking back and forth over these mountains and sharing information, sharing material goods, trading information, trading material goods but also intermarrying, making really strategic choices about when to call a conflict a conflict and when to create alliances and avoid a conflict. That seems very integral to our inheritance here. 

Your writing often circles around the idea that the past is still present in the landscape. Do you think people in Alaska experience history differently because of the land itself and how close we are to that history? 

I think we’ve just got a hugely diverse set of people here. I think that you’re walking around with neighbors who find it very easy to truncate history at a specific moment, whether that’s contact or whether that’s pipeline. I certainly do have neighbors who help dig me out of the ditch who find it very easy to find Alaska history as starting with the pipeline. Then I have neighbors who dig me out of a ditch who don’t see it that way at all, who see a much longer extensive history and, you know, the deer’s use of the Hilda Creek estuary in early spring as this kind of standing long-term understanding of why we don’t disturb certain watersheds and shorelines. I think these time scales seem to exist side-by-side in Alaska. I think that really in the neighborly part of it is, I do not think the way that all of my neighbors think but I do rely on all of my neighbors. 

Is there one essay that feels especially important to read in Southeast Alaska? 

My larger agenda is that even though I focused on our border lands here, I think the collection is relevant to the Americas writ large and potentially globally. That aside, I think that the Kohklux Map essay is potentially the most regionally grounded in the Chilkat Valley and beyond. So that would be one that I think is really important to point at. 

Cook is scheduled to be at The Bookstore at 4 p.m. on Friday, May 15 for a meet and greet, followed by a 5:30 p.m. reading and discussion.