I'm Here: Alaska Stories

by David Nikki Crouse

The stories in I’m Here dramatize life in the Alaskan interior, describing the difficult lives of people in Fairbanks, Alaska as they move through the long, brilliant days of summer into the deep winter months. These are characters living on the tenuous edge of things—on the economic edge caused by poverty and disillusion, on the dividing line between outsider and insider, and on the literal edge of the Alaskan wilderness. The stories in this collection move from beauty to danger and back again with decisive grace, although the lingering effect is not shock, but empathy toward people simultaneously alien and oddly familiar.

272 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2023

Reviews

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very literary collection of stories set in Alaska – but don't think that is all indigenous folks and escaping from bears. In the first story, a young woman experiences an awkward and dramatic trip through the state with her oft-absent father. There might be more of the specific culture in the second piece, when a doctor is summonsed by some children to a domestic. Odd gender nonsense – the lesbian doctor calling herself a man, the narrator refusing to do so – spoils things, mind.

Elsewhere this is concerned with people with what might be called hard-scrabble lives – certainly a less than nuclear family – being driven to Alaska for the want of the new. "In 1977 Seward was a place you could go if you wanted to erase your name from society's ledger." Someone really seems to be on the end of a text-based relationship scam, sending money to Alaska and buying household goods now his main relationship has died a death with money he hasn't got. 'Make Me Whole' might be the best here, as an anecdote becomes a family legend as the family gets more stretched, homeless, desperate. The best is either that or the closing title piece, where a man in Alaska with a dying horse finds contact with the outside world sexing himself up as a young lass for online chats.

All told the stories are rich with real-seeming details of a certain kind of life, a certain kind of upbringing, a certain hopeless future ending in Alaska. They have a variety of narrators and lead characters that can only impress. But if they are bought to be read as entertainment, as levity and/or positivity, they may well heartily disappoint. Oh, and why no editor said that having an Alexis and an Alice in a couple together was a bit of daft naming, I don't know. Three and a half stars all told.

[Jessica Klagmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

All of Alaska’s extremes are present here—the light and the dark, the toughness and the vulnerability required to live in a place so isolated and yet so expansive. A phenomenal collection by a writer whose language and voice I’ve admired for so many years.

[Ylanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s rare to encounter a collection of short stories where, in each one, you find yourself living inside both the protagonist’s mind and that of their doubters. David moves effortlessly between what is fact and what is imagined—between the beauty and brutality of the landscapes his characters inhabit and the inner fictions they create to survive them.

The result is a mosaic of worlds that feel at once foreign and familiar, dreamlike yet utterly human. I’m Here isn’t simply read; it’s experienced—each story a quiet echo of the truths we tell ourselves and the ones we can’t escape.

An extraordinary work of art.