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Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska by Miranda Weiss |
by Sarah Reck
With each book I read, I learn as much about writing as any workshop offers. Miranda Weiss's Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska offers a wealth of advice about writing description. Weiss, who first attended school for biology, produces a nature-writing book so rich with poetic imagery that at times I felt I was right beside her on frozen Alaskan tundra. With a biologist's eye for detail coupled with a poet's attention to word specificity, Weiss creates her world in Alaska, the state nicknamed "The Last Frontier" for good reason.
The book, categorized as nature writing at your local bookstore, is at once a love story between two people (Weiss moves to Alaska with her then-boyfriend John) and a love story between Weiss and the natural world. What I found the most interesting in her telling of her time spent in Homer, Alaska, is her consistent desire to find her place, to fit in. It's something we all yearn for in our daily lives, and yet Weiss attempts it not only in a new town, but also in a new lifestyle. In Homer, she surrounds herself with hardworking, live-off-the land types. Her boyfriend seems to have the answer to anything, and his breadth of knowledge of the terrain, birds, edible plants, and frozen living how-to leaves Weiss feeling inadequate and useless. The tone during these moments in her book is sad, melancholy, and I found myself cheering her on to find something she excels at in the Alaskan wilderness.
Perhaps it is because I am a writer who enjoys focusing on character that I found Weiss's debut almost too laden with description. And while the nature description is beautiful and exact without being dry, her digressions on Alaskan history, the fish trade, and migrating patterns of native birds, left me feeling empty. She interrupts anecdotes with these digressions, tipping the pace of the novel on end. Instead of a straight shot down a single highway, like the drive from Homer to Anchorage on the only road connecting the two, I felt overwhelmed by the dead brush and bramble of an icy tundra, needing to cut this way and that way, forging my own trail.
The novel might lack focus. Weiss sets up several suspenseful moments, including a two-person kayak crossing of a bay in choppy conditions. The pacing of the writing and the hesitancy of Weiss at the crossing sets us up for, at least, mild disaster. But where the writing promises, the reality fails. The trip across the bay is uneventful, and Weiss moves on to her next story and digression.
For what it is, a piece of nature writing about a little-known place, Tide, Feather, Snow is marvelously written. I want specificity of detail to transform words into images. But if Weiss was attempting to chronicle her story around the details of Alaska, I found it too meandering. She accomplishes, though, another thing she might have set out to do: find herself. Remember when I mentioned this book was a love story two times over? The happier ending comes for Weiss as an individual, as a woman who eventually discovers she can live and work the hard, Alaskan land independently of any expert, any native, and any boyfriend.
Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska
Author: Miranda Weiss
Release Date: April 28, 2009
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 978-0061710254
Sarah Reck is the editor of the Reviews section.
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