Ghosts of Distant Trees

In Ghosts of Distant Trees, Erica Watson traces the layered ecologies of Denali National Park, Alaska—its vast, shifting landscape, seasonal labor rhythms, and the subtle politics of inhabitation. Through lyric and narrative essays, she explores how built environments like Denali’s single road shape encounters with land, gender, weather, and community. Turning from iconic vistas to gravel, orange peels, and garden beds, Watson asks what it might be like “to get to know a place without immediately thinking of what threatens it.” Haunted by fire and thaw, these essays resist elegy, offering in¬stead a complex meditation on belonging, vulnerability, and the fragile intimacies that persist in a warming world. This is writing attuned to detail, disruption, and the ethics of attention. Watson is a sharp, unsparing observer and a penetrating thinker; literally and figuratively, she leaves no stone unturned as she travels from an Arizona girlhood to an Alaska womanhood. Watson has cov¬ered a great distance in a far country and brought back for us from that frontier the news we need to hear. —JOE WILKINS, author of The Entire Sky & When We Were Birds By turns researched and intimate, questing and irreverent, Watson digs into the in-between glossed over by promotional campaigns and offers stories of living on land, among neighbors and beings, at the edge of the still-wild world. A unique and grounded voice in Alaska’s vibrant non-fiction chorus. —CHRISTINE BYL, author of Lookout & Dirt Work These essays explore how climate change, political upheaval, and declining infrastructure connects us all, even in those places wrongly considered ‘distant,’ and they do so with a tenderness of attention and care toward the lands, creatures, and communities depicted. —SEAN ENFIELD, author of Holy American Burnout!