Mostly Water

by Mary Odden

In Mostly Water, essays form a linked memoir that explores the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska. In these landscapes, human dwellers are entwined in histories as loopy as northern rivers. Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu “half potlatch and half potluck.” In Mostly Water, readers will hear dance music ring through little towns and watch as friends conspire to stoke the fires and fading memories of an old pioneer. The danger of giving birth takes a crooked path through a mystical elk hunt on its way to the miracle of holding a child. Casual meetings with passengers on an Inside Passage ferry open to intimacy with a Tlingit grandmother and the dignified depths of an ocean-going hobo. Bush town storefronts forsake their rivers to welcome the airplane. The falling of the Twin Towers on 9/11 silences the sky over a remote Alaska village. Short takes on a vivid personal cuisine divide the longer essays of Mostly Water. In these interludes, dead grandmothers mix it up over turkey gravy, and ripe berries are sweet and dangerous after Chernobyl’s radioactive winds blow around the top of the Earth. Events of the churning twenty-first century rise like the sea in these stories—but so do music and love and hope in the precious otherness of nature.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2020

About the author

Mary Odden grew up in eastern Oregon, attended the College of Idaho and worked as a fire lookout and dispatcher. She followed wildfires north to spend most of the last forty years in Alaska: telling smokejumpers where to go, finding true love, digging gardens, playing dance music, listening to stories and exploring remarkable landscapes. She studied writing at the University of Montana and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She worked as a writing teacher and village teen counselor and, for a few busy years, published and edited a small community newspaper — the Copper River Record, distributed in Alaska's Copper River Valley.

Odden’s essays have appeared in the Georgia Review, Northwest Review, Nimrod, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Under Northern Lights, an anthology of contemporary Alaska art and writing. In 2015, she received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award for her work on the essays gathered in Mostly Water, arriving on June 2, 2020 from Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. See website for more.

Reviews

[Gwendolyn Miner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful reflections and thoughts from Mary Odden.
I loved the format with "recipes" after each section.
My favorite was the essay on the ferry trip.
I loved the characters that I met along the way because they were so clearly described.

[Russ · Rating 3 out of 5]

From childhood in Oregon to a ferry through the inside passage to dances in the interior and taking care of our elderly neighbors, Mary takes us on a journey through life in a thoughtful and well written manner. A lot of good stories in here, and she’s gifted with paper and pen.

[Carrie Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book of stories

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

love these essays. her voice rings true