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Spirit Things
A collection of essays that evoke an adventurous spirit and the craving for myth, Spirit Things examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. Author Lara Messersmith-Glavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island.
“Spirit things” are those mundane objects that offer new insights into the world on closer consideration—fishing nets, a favorite knife, and the bioluminescent gleam of seawater in a twilight that never truly grows dark. Spirit Things recounts stories of fishing, family, synesthesia, storytelling, gender, violence, and meaning. Each essay takes an object and follows it through histories: personal, material, and scientific, drawing together the delicate lines that link things through their making and use, their genesis and evolution, and the ways they gain significance in an individual’s life.
A contemplative take on everything from childcare to neurodivergence, comfort foods to outlaws, Spirit Things uses experiences from the human world and locates them on the edges of nature. Contact with wilderness, with wildness, be it twenty-foot seas in the ocean off Alaska’s coast or chairs flying through windows of a Kodiak bar, provides an entry point for meditations on the ways in which patterns, magic, and wonder overlap.
“Spirit things” are those mundane objects that offer new insights into the world on closer consideration—fishing nets, a favorite knife, and the bioluminescent gleam of seawater in a twilight that never truly grows dark. Spirit Things recounts stories of fishing, family, synesthesia, storytelling, gender, violence, and meaning. Each essay takes an object and follows it through histories: personal, material, and scientific, drawing together the delicate lines that link things through their making and use, their genesis and evolution, and the ways they gain significance in an individual’s life.
A contemplative take on everything from childcare to neurodivergence, comfort foods to outlaws, Spirit Things uses experiences from the human world and locates them on the edges of nature. Contact with wilderness, with wildness, be it twenty-foot seas in the ocean off Alaska’s coast or chairs flying through windows of a Kodiak bar, provides an entry point for meditations on the ways in which patterns, magic, and wonder overlap.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
201 pages, Paperback
Published May 20, 2022
4 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 25, 2022
Lara Messersmith-Glavin is a magnificent writer. I feel lucky to now have the chance to read her work as often as I’d like. I have many friends to whom I’d like to pass this book along, but I’ll be keeping a copy for me. If you get the chance to hear the author read live, go go go!
For anyone who has spent time at sea attempting to harvest something that lives there, this book is a knowing squeeze of the hand, nudge of the elbow, or look in the eye. Twenty years after the “end” of her fishing career, Messersmith-Glavin reflects on the wonder of this niche craft in amazing detail and thoughtfulness. My hunch is that even those readers who aren’t fishermen will find something here - probably a love and respect for their own spirit things!
For anyone who has spent time at sea attempting to harvest something that lives there, this book is a knowing squeeze of the hand, nudge of the elbow, or look in the eye. Twenty years after the “end” of her fishing career, Messersmith-Glavin reflects on the wonder of this niche craft in amazing detail and thoughtfulness. My hunch is that even those readers who aren’t fishermen will find something here - probably a love and respect for their own spirit things!
May 14, 2023
Lyrical writing about a quite extraordinary ordinary. Pacing was a little uneven, felt like some parts were reworked from essays or articles and others were added. Overall enjoyable and fascinating.
March 17, 2025
i’m not a fisherman but i was in love with these essays. not many lines stood out to me, but i think it was the whole book, the writing style, and the fact that i was reading about a kind of life i had never read about before, that kept me interested. would definitely read more by messersmith-glavin.
June 3, 2022
Lara Messersmith-Glavin is someone I know from my time as a professor at Portland State University. I would say that I was her teacher, but I probably learned as much from her as she did from me. The quality of writing in this collection of stories (the book blurb says "essays", but Lara’s writing richly transports the reader, with the voice of a storyteller, rather than the voice of a lecturer: "creative nonfiction" as Lara alludes to in the Acknowledgments) is a joy for the reader. We are presented with chapters that convey the stories of her collection of Spirit Things--things as opposed to stuff, things defined by the spirit they carry, by the memories they contain and project--stories that develop and preserve memories. These shared memories allowed me, who has never been on the type of fishing boats Lara describes, to feel as though I now understand that life, that work, those places deeply. I imagine that people who HAVE been on those types of boats will still feel a sense of renewed or perhaps expanded understanding and connection. We watch a young girl grow to a confident woman across a decade or more of summers on her parents’ fishing boat in Alaska, seeing the work, the daily experience, the spirits of things surrounding her and giving shape to the stories that Lara weaves across time, across the water, across the sky. The surprises that these Things hold for us as Lara unpacks them--winch, radio, wake, net, salmon, knot, shell, wave, buoy, number, light, skiff, food, letter, glove, land--are remarkable, ending with a rich sense of Home that Lara, drawing upon a variety of words from different languages, and framing with a quote from Pamela Petro, describes as a place of longing, a reconstructed place that may only ever exist in memory, as revealed in these Spirit Thing Stories.
May 26, 2025
Finding magic and inspiration in everyday things
Spirit Things, by Lara Messersmith-Glavin is a well-written and intriguing book that blends a unique personal history with a deep understanding of science and myths from across cultures into an unforgettable reading experience.
The author spent her childhood summers on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska, giving her an especially unique upbringing. She uses some of the common items that stood out to her from that time — salmon, nets, waves, etc. — to more closely examine her experiences and explore and explain the reality of the industry, all while adroitly weaving in fascinating asides about the science and art of fishing, the biology of fish, the ways of the tides, how we navigate, indigenous myths and the traditions of fishing and sailing cultures.
l picked up this book after meeting the author at a book festival in Astoria. And, ironically, I misplaced it for a while courtesy of a house remodel but luckily found it again in time to read on a little getaway back in Astoria. We were staying in a hotel right on the Columbia River and it was especially powerful reading about her memories of the fishing industry as commercial fishing boats passed back and forth.
The book is (pardon the pun) anchored in her experiences, mostly as a young child. She writes elegantly and confidently about the hardships and the community, the food her mom prepared, her father the captain, the rough but loving “family” crewing the ship, the hard work and brutal conditions and despite the grueling life on a fishing boat, the stolen moments of peace and beauty. While the descriptions of the fishing life are compelling, it’s in the tangents where the book really sings. Connecting her experience with facts and myths and insights that stretch out like a silken spiderweb from that formative childhood experience into something universal.
Spirit Things is not my usual cup of tea because I tend to find deeply personal ruminations a little too, well, personal. When authors delve too deeply into their own experiences, I often find myself on the outside looking in, wondering if I’m feeling it “correctly.” But Messersmith-Glavin is such a talented writer, skillfully navigating the line between introspective and inspiring, always with a powerful and poetic style that kept me engaged and hungry for more.
Consider the ruminations on navigational charts:
“The charts themselves were a swarm and scramble of lines and numbers, a busy chatter overlaid atop a picture of the water’s expanse. Like topography maps in reverse, the lines and shades told stories about depths and rocks and trenches, safe passageways and no-man’s lands and other more esoteric ways to break up the immensity of the ocean.”
I especially enjoyed the chapter on knots, which seem almost magical to a non-nautical person. Appropriately, we were staying in a hotel called The Bowline, and there was a framed print in our hotel room of common nautical knots. It was too perfect, and appreciated her meditation on how she has this vast, almost instinctive knowledge of arcane knots that amaze her friends on land but are usually only deployed to tie something to the top of a car.
One (very) minor disappointment is related to judging the book by its cover. The cover features an image of a knife and, as an obsessive knife lover, I assumed there would be a chapter about blades. There wasn’t.
That tiny point aside, this was a great read that gave me lasting insights into a previously unknown world of fishing boats dragging their nets through a tiny corner of the vast ocean, and their crews. And all from the unique perspective of “mundane” objects.
Highly recommend.
Spirit Things, by Lara Messersmith-Glavin is a well-written and intriguing book that blends a unique personal history with a deep understanding of science and myths from across cultures into an unforgettable reading experience.
The author spent her childhood summers on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska, giving her an especially unique upbringing. She uses some of the common items that stood out to her from that time — salmon, nets, waves, etc. — to more closely examine her experiences and explore and explain the reality of the industry, all while adroitly weaving in fascinating asides about the science and art of fishing, the biology of fish, the ways of the tides, how we navigate, indigenous myths and the traditions of fishing and sailing cultures.
l picked up this book after meeting the author at a book festival in Astoria. And, ironically, I misplaced it for a while courtesy of a house remodel but luckily found it again in time to read on a little getaway back in Astoria. We were staying in a hotel right on the Columbia River and it was especially powerful reading about her memories of the fishing industry as commercial fishing boats passed back and forth.
The book is (pardon the pun) anchored in her experiences, mostly as a young child. She writes elegantly and confidently about the hardships and the community, the food her mom prepared, her father the captain, the rough but loving “family” crewing the ship, the hard work and brutal conditions and despite the grueling life on a fishing boat, the stolen moments of peace and beauty. While the descriptions of the fishing life are compelling, it’s in the tangents where the book really sings. Connecting her experience with facts and myths and insights that stretch out like a silken spiderweb from that formative childhood experience into something universal.
Spirit Things is not my usual cup of tea because I tend to find deeply personal ruminations a little too, well, personal. When authors delve too deeply into their own experiences, I often find myself on the outside looking in, wondering if I’m feeling it “correctly.” But Messersmith-Glavin is such a talented writer, skillfully navigating the line between introspective and inspiring, always with a powerful and poetic style that kept me engaged and hungry for more.
Consider the ruminations on navigational charts:
“The charts themselves were a swarm and scramble of lines and numbers, a busy chatter overlaid atop a picture of the water’s expanse. Like topography maps in reverse, the lines and shades told stories about depths and rocks and trenches, safe passageways and no-man’s lands and other more esoteric ways to break up the immensity of the ocean.”
I especially enjoyed the chapter on knots, which seem almost magical to a non-nautical person. Appropriately, we were staying in a hotel called The Bowline, and there was a framed print in our hotel room of common nautical knots. It was too perfect, and appreciated her meditation on how she has this vast, almost instinctive knowledge of arcane knots that amaze her friends on land but are usually only deployed to tie something to the top of a car.
One (very) minor disappointment is related to judging the book by its cover. The cover features an image of a knife and, as an obsessive knife lover, I assumed there would be a chapter about blades. There wasn’t.
That tiny point aside, this was a great read that gave me lasting insights into a previously unknown world of fishing boats dragging their nets through a tiny corner of the vast ocean, and their crews. And all from the unique perspective of “mundane” objects.
Highly recommend.
June 12, 2022
Lara Messersmith-Glavin's memoir SPIRIT THINGS recounts her memories of growing up on a commercial fishing boat... a child in a man's world in the company of mostly men and a few exceptional women.. Experiencing her boat home and its mechanics, the ocean in its terrifying power and beauty, the salmon seines, the dynamics of living and working with crew and skipper (her dad) , the rhythm of long days of work with little sleep she provides a good look at this way of life from her perspective as a child and as a woman.
Lara M-G's prose flows like music... her mastery of language delightful. This book will be enjoyed by readers with a sense of adventure, those who know this wet world and those who do not, and perhaps particularly those who feel the spirit and strength in inanimate things and appreciate the importance of their histories. A beautiful read.
July 25, 2022
This book is fascinating, heart wrenching and beautiful. Lara weaves a story that describes the social, emotional and physical toll of the lives of those who live to fish in the Alaskan waters. She shares the story and honors the history of this life with all the beautiful and ugly and hurtful truths while teaching us the history of this lifestyle and how it shaped her life then and now and how it relates to who we are and why we are. Loved every work of this beautifully written collection of essays. This is not a book about fishing but a book about living a real life with all its complicated pieces.
November 29, 2022
What a stunning book. Beautifully written, it is a big-hearted and unflinching gathering of essays about time spent growing up on a fishing boat in Alaska. A thoughtful interweaving of memoir, science, mythology and wonder. Such a satisfying read, it's one of those books I was sad to see end. One of the few books that I will probably read again.
June 26, 2023
So well written! I’ve never worked on a fishing boat, but grew up in a southern Oregon fishing community, and now have lived in Alaska more than 20 years — Lara Messersmith-Glavin’s descriptions brought back lots of memories. I love the meaning she drew from so many common objects.
June 8, 2022
Lara Messersmith-Glavin is absolutely brilliant and this is an absolute must read.
June 10, 2022
So beautiful.
January 6, 2025
This was a sweet book to listen to. Lara’s voice is calm and soothing as she narrates her own accounts of childhood- mainly on a fishing boat off the coast of Alaska. I really relate to giving things and objects a life and a spirit and meaning. I particularly LOOOVED the chapter “Shells” and her incorporation of liminal spaces throughout the book.
June 8, 2022
Such beautiful, imaginative, and tender writing.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews