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Leaving Resurrection
Leaving Resurrection is one woman's love poem to the Alaskan places and people that have taken possession of her soul. Eva Saulitis writes with great honesty about her vulnerability and fears, about her excitement and discoveries, and about her passionate love for the wild. She inspires us with her boldness, she invites us to eagerly accept challenges, she opens us to the willing embrace of adventure, and she takes us into the hidden glories of Alaska as few other writers have done.
These gentle, richly perceptive, beautifully rendered stories take readers straight to the heart of Alaska. And like all fine writing, it leaves you aching for more. Eva Saulitis writes deeply from the spirit of Margaret Murie, and she shows us that the soul of wildness is still very much alive in the north country.
The wild country of Alaska has always attracted women of extraordinary strength and character, women with a keen eye for the land's beauty and a heart strong enough for its challenges, women equal to the measure of the Alaskan land itself. Eva Saulitis and Leaving Resurrection are wonderful reminders that the tradition lives on.
These gentle, richly perceptive, beautifully rendered stories take readers straight to the heart of Alaska. And like all fine writing, it leaves you aching for more. Eva Saulitis writes deeply from the spirit of Margaret Murie, and she shows us that the soul of wildness is still very much alive in the north country.
The wild country of Alaska has always attracted women of extraordinary strength and character, women with a keen eye for the land's beauty and a heart strong enough for its challenges, women equal to the measure of the Alaskan land itself. Eva Saulitis and Leaving Resurrection are wonderful reminders that the tradition lives on.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
Eva Saulitis
6 books20 followersEva Saulitis was the author of the forthcoming book, "Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas," (Beacon Press, 2012). She has studied whales in Prince William Sound, the Kenai Fjords, and Alaska's Aleutian Islands for the past twenty-four years. In addition to her scientific publications, her essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in numerous national journals, including Orion, Crazyhorse, and Prairie Schooner. The author of the essay collection Leaving Resurrection and the poetry collection Many Ways to Say It, she taught at Kenai Peninsula College, in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska, and at the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference. She lived in Homer, Alaska.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 29, 2018
If there is a blurred line between whale guts and poetry, Eva Saulitis is comfortable traversing it. She observes and brings the reader into the experiences of the boundaries of nature and humanity while studying whales in Alaska.
February 6, 2012
Beautiful and sometimes haunting writing about the author's experiences and musings as a whale scientist in the Prince William Sound. I love her writing-- for the poetry of her prose and how well it evokes the people and landscape of the Sound. Made me miss Alaska. She covers a range of experiences and emotions too, all interesting to inhabit. A big thank you to Marty Williams for suggesting this book. It was hard to find, but very worth the effort.
December 3, 2019
This book is so good. It's a collection of essays about living in Alaska as a whale biologist. There are bits and pieces of whale science in there, but mostly that's just the context - this is a book about the challenges of life, from someone who happens to spend a lot of time living in remote places and on small diesel boats chasing whales around the Alaskan coast.
November 30, 2024
I could taste the salt air and smell the fish-tang of the ocean while reading. Every word perfectly chosen, every idea a direct hit. Reading about places you have been make the memories come alive more in your mind. The sights, the events. I loved this book so much. I sobbed reading it while packing to move from Homer, and it took me 5 years to pick it up again. And it was still gutting but beautiful and important. Wondering how the transients are faring without Eva to visit them in the summers now. Such beautiful writing, such important ideas. This book is precious to me.
December 20, 2013
Writer and poet Eva Saulitis elegantly probes the relationships between art and science in her first book of essays, LEAVING RESURRECTION: CHRONICLES OF A WHALE SCIENTIST, published by Fairbanks-based Red Hen Press. Saulitis, having earned graduate degrees in both biology and writing, is no stranger to the act of asking questions—as a scientist, she poses them, gathers data in order to discern facts, then articulates and tests hypotheses. As a writer, she's able to explore her visceral subjectivities. Ultimately, her analytic and artistic impulses complement one another.
LEAVING RESURRECTION is the chronicle of one woman’s capacity to know in many ways at once, to hold contradictory truths in mind. She faces doubts about science which generate an epistemological vertigo when it seems that science can’t teach us to “stay true to [our] place in the local ecology” the way traditional native stories can. She fathoms the depths of place—mainly southcentral Alaska’s Prince William Sound, though other locales in Alaska and the lower 48 appear in the book. The book records this artist/scientist’s challenge to transmute scientific knowledge and human uncertainty into wisdom. Through the rigor of her work as a biologist and essayist, Saulitis engenders truths which register in both the mind and the gut.
The collection opens with a stunning short essay based on Saulitis’s task of removing the stomach from a beached killer whale on a Prince William Sound beach. At one point, Saulitis literally slips into the cavity she’s opened in the orca. Standing “shin-deep in blood and body fluid,” she is quite immersed in her work and the world. The essay is a fitting place to begin, scuttling any notions that the work of science is somehow abstract or removed from the physical world.
More than the land and seascapes of Alaska and its animals fall under the purview of these essays—Saulitis is concerned, too, with memory and dream, imagination and observation, history and the present, the nature of story and ecology, family and ancestry. And she devotes a great deal of the book to the people who have done much to enliven the place she has made her own—her friend and assistant, Mary Lou Freeman; the old man, Bill, who carries his burden of sorrow out onto a frozen wilderness lake with her; Dora and George, caretakers of a remote Prince William Sound oyster farm; her childhood family and teachers; her eventual husband and step-children. By making plain the intimacy between people and place, Saulitis imbues her work with a sense of community that makes her introspective forays into isolation or the mind seem anything but solipsistic.
The orcas of Prince William Sound remain the book’s touchstone, though. Her authentic struggle with the dictates and limits of science and her heartfelt attention to place limns a dynamic between science and art that behaves something like an ecosystem itself. Like the balance struck between orca and sea lion, science and art are fundamentally different yet interactive, constituent parts of our world views. Saulitis reminds us why science is important while realizing that our task as citizens of local and global ecologies is to actively and consciously strive to unite conscience with knowledge and to guard against those who would refuse any commingling of the creative and analytical modes, which share, after all, the impulse to ask questions about the world and ourselves.
Observing and asking questions as scientist and artist engenders a useful yearning: “The eye that searches for wolves, for spouts, for freedom, is desire’s eye and soon what it has seen becomes necessary to the body as a lung,” writes Saulitis. “In the end, looking for wolves, looking for killer whales, is more than an act of scrutiny or listening—it’s an act of patience, of devotion. It’s a long story of waiting. It’s a story of desire…. You hear the voice of your own longing, a trail, if you follow it, that leads your eye further into a landscape populated as much with absence as with presences.”
Following Saulitis’s voice as she breaks new trail through a growing corpus of Alaskan literature enlivens the places she writes about even as the journey reminds us that much is still unnamed in the literature of the north. And even as the blanks on the map fill with ink like a rock slowly growing lichen, the work of navigating the interiors of our own selves is often a process inextricable from the places where we find ourselves.
LEAVING RESURRECTION is the chronicle of one woman’s capacity to know in many ways at once, to hold contradictory truths in mind. She faces doubts about science which generate an epistemological vertigo when it seems that science can’t teach us to “stay true to [our] place in the local ecology” the way traditional native stories can. She fathoms the depths of place—mainly southcentral Alaska’s Prince William Sound, though other locales in Alaska and the lower 48 appear in the book. The book records this artist/scientist’s challenge to transmute scientific knowledge and human uncertainty into wisdom. Through the rigor of her work as a biologist and essayist, Saulitis engenders truths which register in both the mind and the gut.
The collection opens with a stunning short essay based on Saulitis’s task of removing the stomach from a beached killer whale on a Prince William Sound beach. At one point, Saulitis literally slips into the cavity she’s opened in the orca. Standing “shin-deep in blood and body fluid,” she is quite immersed in her work and the world. The essay is a fitting place to begin, scuttling any notions that the work of science is somehow abstract or removed from the physical world.
More than the land and seascapes of Alaska and its animals fall under the purview of these essays—Saulitis is concerned, too, with memory and dream, imagination and observation, history and the present, the nature of story and ecology, family and ancestry. And she devotes a great deal of the book to the people who have done much to enliven the place she has made her own—her friend and assistant, Mary Lou Freeman; the old man, Bill, who carries his burden of sorrow out onto a frozen wilderness lake with her; Dora and George, caretakers of a remote Prince William Sound oyster farm; her childhood family and teachers; her eventual husband and step-children. By making plain the intimacy between people and place, Saulitis imbues her work with a sense of community that makes her introspective forays into isolation or the mind seem anything but solipsistic.
The orcas of Prince William Sound remain the book’s touchstone, though. Her authentic struggle with the dictates and limits of science and her heartfelt attention to place limns a dynamic between science and art that behaves something like an ecosystem itself. Like the balance struck between orca and sea lion, science and art are fundamentally different yet interactive, constituent parts of our world views. Saulitis reminds us why science is important while realizing that our task as citizens of local and global ecologies is to actively and consciously strive to unite conscience with knowledge and to guard against those who would refuse any commingling of the creative and analytical modes, which share, after all, the impulse to ask questions about the world and ourselves.
Observing and asking questions as scientist and artist engenders a useful yearning: “The eye that searches for wolves, for spouts, for freedom, is desire’s eye and soon what it has seen becomes necessary to the body as a lung,” writes Saulitis. “In the end, looking for wolves, looking for killer whales, is more than an act of scrutiny or listening—it’s an act of patience, of devotion. It’s a long story of waiting. It’s a story of desire…. You hear the voice of your own longing, a trail, if you follow it, that leads your eye further into a landscape populated as much with absence as with presences.”
Following Saulitis’s voice as she breaks new trail through a growing corpus of Alaskan literature enlivens the places she writes about even as the journey reminds us that much is still unnamed in the literature of the north. And even as the blanks on the map fill with ink like a rock slowly growing lichen, the work of navigating the interiors of our own selves is often a process inextricable from the places where we find ourselves.
March 16, 2014
This was an outstanding book, eloquently written, about a woman from "The Outside" finding herself in The Last Frontier. Perhaps only fellow transplants into Alaska will have even an inkling of how the author feels, and certainly she was a lot more Alaskan than I ever was, but everything resonated with me: the transplantation from the familiar, the awe and appreciation of nature's creatures, the soul-searching that comes from new environs and unsettling situations. But it was also fascinating to read about how she adjusted to such frigid and foreign conditions, and made them her own, identification and adaptation without total assimilation. Beautifully told and with very personal insight, this was a great book to learn about Alaska, whales, and the effect that has on a person finding herself.
July 2, 2025
I wish, so desperately, that I could’ve talked to Eva about her stories and her writing before she passed. This book, like all her others, is so unbelievably raw and beautiful. I lens into the life of research and writing, fact and wisdom. I cannot help but yearn for more, and i cannot help but tuck all of these stories within me to share with others about this place i love so dearly.
“The Chenega elders are dying, one by one: Eddie, you, your best friend Chenega Pete. Few people in the village hunt seals anymore. The transients are dying, one by one. Neither group can be replaced. If landscape helps define who we are, do we help define the landscape? What is the Sound without you in your skiff, hunting seals in the old spots? What is the Sound without the transients, hunting seals in the old spots? I'd like to think you're swimming out there, though it's very unscientific of me.”
“The Chenega elders are dying, one by one: Eddie, you, your best friend Chenega Pete. Few people in the village hunt seals anymore. The transients are dying, one by one. Neither group can be replaced. If landscape helps define who we are, do we help define the landscape? What is the Sound without you in your skiff, hunting seals in the old spots? What is the Sound without the transients, hunting seals in the old spots? I'd like to think you're swimming out there, though it's very unscientific of me.”
February 27, 2008
Eva's poems have surfaced from time to time in my reading for many years. When I work as a naturalist in Southeast Alaska, I use her book on killer whales as a resource. Now we get a blending of both worlds -- the poet-biologist exploring her explorations of self and of the natural world. This is an exciting first book. It's billed as a memoir -- but that's not quite the right categorization. This is more an artistic, intellectual, philosophical exploration.
February 24, 2018
Beautifully written, deeply moving, and profoundly honest stories about the places Eva loved with all her heart. Alaska lost a great voice when she passed away way much too early.
November 23, 2009
a unique search for truth mixing scientific fact, with lore and tradition. the author studies migratory whales in alaska and is also a poet. she gives just as much weight to data as she does to folktales and oral history. she writes about the changes that alaska is facing and how the valdez oil spill is still hurting the land.
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October 16, 2011I didn't particularly enjoy this and didn't even make it halfway through the book before I felt like I had so many better things to read. The writing itself is good and there's no doubt about the author's talent. But the content didn't do it for me. I felt like I was reading a personal diary; I didn't belong there. And so I left.
March 20, 2011
Saulitis charts the outer waters of Prince William Sound and the inner waters of the psyche. A book filled with beautiful images and beautiful language. I've recommended this book to many people who are visiting the Sound. Don't miss it.
February 13, 2012
It took some time to settle into Eva's voice--i had to be more patient than I was ready to be at first. But when i was open to it, this became one of the most beautiful intersections of science, life, and poetry that i've read in a long, long time.
April 6, 2014
The author's heart and spirit run deep within her words and story. She brings the reader into Prince William Sound, the lives of the whales, and her personal journey. A marvelous book that continues way beyond its pages.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews