Mostly Water

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." 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. Mary Odden's essays have appeared in the Georgia Review, Northwest Review, Nimrod, the Alaska Quarterly Review, and Under Northern Lights, an anthology of contemporary Alaska art and writing. Born in eastern Oregon, she traveled north to do forest fire work in Alaska. She studied writing at the University of Montana and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has worked as an aviation dispatcher, village teen counselor, writing teacher, and as publisher/editor of a small newspaper in Alaska's Copper River Valley. In 2015, she received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award for the essays gathered in Mostly Water. She lives with her husband in Nelchina, Alaska