It came during her son’s nap, a time that friends generally know not to call, so Kane didn’t even bother to listen to the message until later in the afternoon. The WASP-y voice on the machine said something about a Whiting Foundation.
Although Kane was a writer, she didn’t recognize the name, so she googled them. It turned out they were kind of a big deal—a reputable foundation that sponsored a prestigious writing prize. That was when she wondered if her writer friends from New York might be pulling her leg. But the message on the machine seemed real—the device’s caller ID even recognized the number—and the number left in the voicemail, when she dialed it, seemed to go to the right place.
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“It was an excruciating 12 hours,” Kane recalls. She didn’t sleep much.
But the following day, it became clear that the wait was worth it. Kane had been named one of the 2009 winners of the Whiting Prize, a major award that’s been given annually to ten talented writers early in their careers for the past 25 years.
Past recipients have included Gretel Ehrlich, Ian Frazier, Jorie Graham, and one of Kane’s own literary heroes, David Foster Wallace.
“That was the coolest part for me,” she says. “Am I really—do I really get to count myself in with these people?”
For Kane, an Inupiaq mom living in Fairview, whose first collection of poems hadn’t even been released by then, the validation was a big deal.
But the prize also represents just one step in what’s been a long journey towards Kane’s literary career.
Kane grew up in a household in Muldoon that emphasized reading and writing. There was no television at home. One of her Inupiaq grandmothers, who grew up in an orphanage at Pilgrim Hot Springs, was bilingual in English and Inupiaq, a rarity for that time, especially among women. A grandfather, on the other hand, an accomplished ivory carver, never learned to write or speak English. From both those family histories, she drew the lesson that literacy was important
Her father, himself an English major, encouraged her reading habit. So did teachers. This was during the oil bust years of the ‘80s, so Kane got a lot of attention from those teachers in their half-empty classrooms, she says. And she spent a lot of time in libraries.
“It’s when the city had libraries that were open every day of the week,” she laughs.
Early on, the young Kane discovered that immersing herself in reading and writing was a means for processing and interpreting her experiences growing up. And it was an opportunity to explore a world beyond Muldoon.
“Literature and reading allowed me to learn about the world in ways that I definitely otherwise wouldn’t have.”
Among the things that Kane was able to glean from books was a sense of the life her grandmother experienced on King Island.
As long as she can remember, the book King Island Tales, by Larry Kaplan, has been a part of her life (she still keeps a copy by her bedside). The book consists of tales and oral histories of life on King Island—an island in the Bering Sea off of the Seward Peninsula that served as the winter home for a group of Inupiat until the 1960s. Many of the pages have Inupiaq on one side and an English translation on the other.
The book was like a “Rosetta stone” for her, says Kane, connecting her to stories of her grandmother’s life that she simply couldn’t find elsewhere.
Kane’s grandmother—the one who grew up in the church orphanage in Pilgrim Hot Springs, who spoke both English and Inupiaq, who almost went on to get a formal education, but instead went into an arranged marriage to a King Islander, at the behest of the church, and wound up spending most of a lifetime there—is an elusive yet powerful force in Kane’s writing.
Even the title of her first volume, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, is a reference to her grandmother.
Kane’s desire to better understand this woman seems to haunt its pages.
The poems are full of female characters, many of them ambiguous or incompletely sketched, leaving room for wonder and questions.
In the poem that shares its title with the volume, for instance, the reader is left wondering about the connection of the female character—who goes unnamed—to the dark seabirds, as well as the nature of her fate.
Taken more broadly, much of the rest of Kane’s first volume is ambiguous too, and will doubtless be daunting to the casual reader—at least at first. This ambiguity is no defect, though, but rather the intended result of Kane’s approach to poetry.
“There’s an ambiguity to landscape; there is an emotional ambiguity,” she says. “I think poetry occupies that space. Poetry is able to do that in a way that is subtle and brief and that allows a reader to deduce things.”
Kane’s succeeds in creating poems that occupy that space, and require deduction—and perhaps something more. Take the first section of her poem “Stative.” After a few lines detailing a pair of wildflowers native to Alaska, the poem’s narrator grows reflective:
I pick these flowers for weather,
To ferment and powder.
I do not know their cure, heal or sour,
Or if it is my name, again written
On thousand times, grove upon grove.
This is a formula Kane employs with some regularity. She begins with a concrete image, such as the flowers, suggests a narrative in which they belong, and then adds a wrinkle —“or if it is my name…”—that re-opens to the door to other meanings and interpretations, forcing the reader to double back on his assumptions, like a fox studiously avoiding leaving a trail.
In poetry, “you can have freedom from a linear narrative,” Kane says, and she enjoys that freedom fully.
Kane’s childhood and adolescence spent immersed in books paid off; in 1994, she graduated a year early from Bartlett, with a place reserved for her at Harvard. But rather than begin college early, Kane chose to take the intervening year away from study. She worked as a peer outreach counselor—“essentially handing out birth control at bus stations,” she jokes (although her subsequent description suggests the job actually entailed a lot of responsibility for a teenager)—and at the Fifth Avenue Mall.
As that year drew to a close, Kane did something that surprised even herself. With savings from her mall job, she bought a cheap plane ticket from Los Angeles to London. Then she told her parents about it and asked them to fund her way to L.A. Despite parental misgivings, they agreed.
Kane visited London and other parts of England, but the highlight of her trip was traveling to Ireland, where she has relatives. She fell in love with the language and resolved to study it when she reached Harvard that fall.
About her time at the Ivy League institution, Kane has relatively little to say. The “great” Native American program there helped her with the transition she said, and Sven Haakanson Jr., an Alutiiq from Old Harbor—who’s since become executive director of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant—was a graduate student there at the time, and a friend to her. Despite her rigorous course work, even at Harvard, she found time to read and write for pleasure. “It wasn’t a chore,” she says.
After graduating from Harvard, Kane moved back to Anchorage for a year, then packed up and headed to New York City, where she would enroll in the Master’s of Fine Arts in Writing Program at Columbia University. She settled in New York three weeks before September 11, 2001.
Once she moved to New York, Kane’s work on her poetry took on a new seriousness. Some of the poems in The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife date from as far back as 2001, and most of it was written while she lived in New York. Until 2006, when she moved back to Anchorage, Kane traveled a lot between New York City and Nome (she still has relatives among the King Islanders there), in part to draw inspiration from the landscape of Western Alaska.
Kane had spent childhood summers in Nome and elsewhere in Bush Alaska, visiting family or accompanying her father on work trips. For her, growing up, “The distinction between Anchorage and the rest of the state wasn’t as pronounced, I don’t think.”
Yet in some ways, seeing the terrain of the Seward Peninsula on those trips back from New York was like seeing it for the first time.
“The thing that is most singular is the perspective that you get from this beautiful ancient country,” she says.
Given statements like that one, and given her Inupiaq heritage and the place Alaska holds in the American imagination, it would be easy for Kane to be adopted—and perhaps co-opted—by a popular strain of nature poetry that for the moment fills bookstore shelves and environmental studies curricula.
Don’t expect that to happen though. Kane herself is a critic of some of the grosser forms of nature writing.
“There’s also this horrible body of writing that writes over-romantically about the land,” she says. She finds such treatment superficial, and “at times, disrespectful of the land.”
And just as her poems convey ambiguity, they also convey a certain ambivalence toward the land, and it’s meaning.
Among other things, her poetry “reflects some of the alienation that I feel as someone who’s grown up in predominately urban areas—that I can never know the land in a certain way,” she says.
Her grandmother, she says, once told her about certain currents you needed to know in order to navigate from the mainland to King Island. That knowledge is lost to Kane—maybe to everyone. And her poems evoke a certain disorientation in the face of the loss of such knowledge and an apprehension about what the loss might mean, if it means anything at all.
At the same time, though, she wary of what she calls “a tendency to archeologize, of putting things in the past tense.” Kane’s grandmother and the lifestyle she and the other King Islanders led may be gone, but the landscape is still here, in the present.
In 2006, with a three-ring binder filled with many of the poems that would eventually become The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (and some that wouldn’t, too), Kane moved back to Alaska. Within a year and a half, she’d met her husband, married him, had their first child and bought a home in Fairview.
All the while, she kept working on the poems, reshuffling them in the binder to see how they played off one another. But it didn’t quite feel like she had a book yet.
“I think it came when I started to get blurbs back,” she says. Sending out those requests (something she was obligated to do in order to ink a publishing deal) was tough; “I found it more excruciating that your usual social anxiety,” she says.
The first writer to agree to blurb her book was Joy Harjo, a prominent Native American poet.
“To have her say: ‘This is good; this is important…’” made the project seem real.
Kane eventually worked out a deal to have the book published by NorthShore Press, a one-woman operation run by Anne Coray, who lives off the grid here in Alaska.
She was focused on the finishing up the book for its October release when the call from the Whiting Foundation came “out of the blue.”
Seth Kantner—a writer whose situation is in some ways the reverse of Kane’s; he’s a white guy living a subsistence lifestyle in Inupiat country—received a Whiting Award in 2005.
In an email to the Press, he described it thus:
“For me the Whiting—which I instantly nicknamed ‘The Whiteboy Award’—was not like winning the lottery or a contest. They comb the country, secretly, and then quietly tap on your door and say they think what you’re doing is special; please keep doing it. Probably down inside we all feel that way, special and deserving, but how often does a foundation in a distant city pick you out and give you a prize for it? In that way the Whiting is the opposite of any contest or lottery.
“As for the money, well it’s great, but it’s no $100 million. For writers who most often make less than minimum wage for their work, 40 or 50 thousand soaks quickly into boat repairs, new hipboots or whatever else has been leaking in your life.” (Indeed, Kane, who’s pregnant with her second child, says she’ll use the money to take a sort of self-funded maternity leave from her consulting work when the baby arrives, and to pay for health care insurance, among other things.)
Like Kantner, Kane felt that the award validated her writing in a way that seemed to matter.
When she moved back to Alaska, she moved back to a place where people knew her from her old network. The part of her that was a writer seemed to have stayed behind in New York, or at least faded from view. It was “part of my identity that no one [in Alaska] really knew or took seriously,” she says. The Whiting changed that. “I can come back to Alaska and be a writer now; it’s like a new slate,” she says. (In fact, our conversation is interrupted by two old friends who stop by to congratulate Kane on the award.)
Beyond bridging that divide between her New York and Anchorage worlds, the award has also simply boosted her confidence.
“Anyone who writes doubts,” she says. To have such a concrete buffer against those doubts, “that’s truly liberating as a writer.”
With her first work finally in print, and the national recognition the Whiting brings, Kane is poised at an important point in her career.
She’s at work now on a second manuscript of poetry, as well as a full-length play. While she was in Manhattan to accept her award last month, she met and talked to a number of literary agents. She’ll be on the faculty at this year’s Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, and at an event at the University of Alaska’s Nome campus.
She’s received a grant from the National Native Creative Development Program at Evergreen State College to create an online concordance for her book at its website, thecormoranthunterswife.com.
After that? Who knows, says Kane.
“I think it’d be wise for me to try my hand at fiction.”
krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com
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