Corinna Cook is the author of Leavetakings, an essay collection published by University of Alaska Press. Her current project looks at the arts, ecologies, and histories of Alaska and Yukon. READ BIO.
The pandemic grows long. I am (like many) feeling a deep and deepening hunger for live performance arts, as egregiously limited access to in-person performance has us on some kind of starvation-level arts rations. In my body it registers more and more as homesickness: a palpable, persistent sensation of missing and need.
The two notable exceptions—life rafts of my year, honestly—included one absolutely stupendous cello and classical guitar concert offered at Savikko Park in Juneau, and one absolutely stupendous modern dance performance offered at the Rec Hall at the edge of the Kennicott Glacier in the Wrangell Mountains near McCarthy.
About the latter of the two, I wrote a short report for the Columbia Climate School’s publication, GlacierHub. Full piece available here.
Photographed above: dancers Alexandra Williamson and Betsy Fisher accompanied by musician Ernie Provencher. Photo courtesy of Todd Paris.
Above: Yukon-based Graphic Recorder / Visual Art Scribe Hannah McDonald illustrates the Leavetakings book launch in this gorgeous 23-second clip. Below: stills by Hannah McDonald.
One day I went to the museum and stood a while in front of a photograph by Anna Hoover and later on I thought about swans and squid and high school calculus camp and wrote an essay about the beginning of the universe, “Fluid Places.” It’s in my book, Leavetakings. And here it is published as a book excerpt in Chatter Marks.
Edible Alaska‘s beautiful summertime issue is out. It includes as amuse bouche my flash essay, a salsa-based theory life called “The Far Places.” See magazine spreads below, and enjoy online access here.
“Corinna Cook’s Leavetakings brings to mind the sharpness of line drawings so extraordinarily crafted that we reach for the page to feel the fineness of feather. From Alaskan landscapes to human relationships, Cook tests the edges where exterior becomes interior.”
—Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers
“…a truly original voice.”
—Sherry Simpson, author of Dominion of Bears
Leavetakings collects nine essays set in Alaska. They ask, what can coming and going reveal about place? Might wandering serve not only to map new regions but also to map the most familiar ones, like home? As the book travels to and from people, memories, beaches, and forests, it also studies the ebb and flow of empathy and alienation that makes friendship, like place, a complex of closeness and distance.
“A stunning debut.”
—Jericho Parms, author of Lost Wax
To order a signed copy / purchase a book from me directly, email corinna.cook@gmail.com
Send me: – a mailing address for shipping – inscribing instructions (specify if you’d simply like a signed copy, or name the person you’d like it inscribed to) Price options: $16.95 book + safely distanced in-person pickup (no postage) $20 book + postage Venmo @Corinna-Cook-1 *Happy to make special arrangements one-on-one for multi-book orders, non-Venmo users, or shipping to Canada.
“Breathtaking…. Every chiseled, staggeringly focused experience becomes a window into history or myth or science… This incantatory, elegant book broke my heart in the best possible way.”
Here you can access a live recording of my book launch, a digital event with reading, conversation, and Q&A. Bonus: see a Visual Scribe’s take on the event.
“This lovely book teaches us how to examine and cherish the places where we find ourselves, no matter what rivers carried us here.”
—Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire
Advance Praise for Leavetakings
What does it mean to love a place? In Leavetakings, Corinna Cook explores this question via her own unique alloy “of humor and holiness.” Salmon otoliths whisper secrets; teenagers at calculus camp joke “Kiss My Asymptote”; a winged outhouse rises into the air. This lovely book teaches us how to examine and cherish the places where we find ourselves, no matter what rivers carried us here.
—Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire
In this, her first essay collection, Corinna Cook draws for her reader an x-y axis and invites us to journey alongside her—on and off grid—as she plots stasis and change, leaving and returning, meditates on salmon bones and sourdough, friendship and solitude, and the ever-present landscape of Alaska. More than a collection, Leavetakings is a book of curated findings, evidence of a vast and changing northern terrain and the intimacy and wonder it engenders. With clarity, whimsy, and wisdom, Cook speaks to the body, charts under-explored regions of the heart, and presents a unique topography of human experience. A stunning debut.
—Jericho Parms, author of Lost Wax
Again and again I found myself astonished by the incandescence of Corinna Cook’s essays. Her accounts of people and place are thoughtful without pretension, witty without affectation, and poignant without sentimentality because she doesn’t write about Alaska so much as she is inhabited by it. I emerged from the intimate dreaminess of Leavetakings grateful to have encountered a truly original voice.
—Sherry Simpson, author of Dominion of Bears
Corinna Cook’s Leavetakings brings to mind the sharpness of line drawings so extraordinarily crafted that we reach for the page to feel the fineness of feather. From Alaskan landscapes to human relationships, Cook tests the edges where exterior becomes interior.
—Karen Babine, author of All the Wild Hungers
Corinna Cook’s breathtaking Leavetakings is an unclassifiable hybrid of environmental writing and personal memoir—set mostly in the author’s native Alaska—that reads, on the sentence level, as pure poetry. Cook doesn’t write of or at a subject, she writes through it. Every chiseled, staggeringly focused experience becomes a window into history or myth or science . . . This incantatory, elegant book broke my heart in the best possible way.”
Excerpt from “Traverses,” the collection’s first essay:
It is this simple. I am crossing the continent to look at its shape.
Of the continent: it’s unbelievable that road infrastructure overlays so much of it. Unbelievable that a whole plate of the earth’s crust has a net of asphalt threads laid atop it. Unbelievable, the nonchalance this creates. Crossing the continent to see its shape is less an expedition and more a comfortable contemplation. I will ford no rivers. I will search for passage through the mountains not for survival, but simply to walk my dog, Pep, study the game trails, and enjoy wayfinding on unfamiliar ground.
I will watch the continent change as I go north in early spring. Then in late summer, I will watch it change in reverse. It is important to go both directions. It takes repetitions to see where you’ve been. And things look different when you’re leaving: even the air is different. Often, what I’m leaving is Alaska, though in my heart I am never absent from the place and my departures probably reflect more obscure schisms. At least the place is a marker, clear enough that I can count the days until I return. When the number is small, I announce it: Dog! I say. We’re going back! She knows exactly where.
[…] It’s mid-May. It’s spring in a place where the land’s memory of winter is strong. I’ll be driving out well before breakfast, well before anyone else awakens. Eventually the day will open behind me; the sky will go from rose to blue. Later, summer will come. People—southerners—will begin trickling through; I’m ahead of the RV roadtripping curve, but it’ll follow soon enough. Visitors will come, then they’ll go, and then the days will zip up tight into fall. That’s when the swampy land all around will blush once, hard, a quick bright red before the snow. I don’t even know if you like winter. I do. It’s very quiet. That’s what will come next.
The Artists of Alaska series is an ambitious, statewide project curated and coordinated by the Rasmson Foundation and 49 Writers. The project pairs Alaskan writers with Rasmuson Foundation grant awardees. The result: a growing compilation of narrative-driven artist profiles of and by Alaskans.
Here’s an excerpt from my profile on Chilkat weaver Ricky Tagaban:
Ricky Tagaban kneels on his studio floor and reaches under the table, ripped jeans making it easy to maneuver. He hauls out a gray tote bin and plunges his hand into the coarse white fur that fills it: unprocessed mountain goat wool.
Strong, long guard hairs are integrated in tufts and clumps of undercoat, and a few bits of bark and dirt fleck the richly off-white wool with dark specs of forest and mountain. Tagaban rests his forearms on the edge of the bin, letting his hands land on a clump of wool. “If you have this mountain goat wool, you’ve got to pull all the guard hairs out,” he explains, reflexively beginning to do just that. “And if there’s poop, or slugs, or sticks, or moss, or grass — that all gets thrown away too,” says Tagaban. “The undercoat is the really wooly part. That’s what you want.”
The Artists of Alaska series is an ambitious, statewide project curated and coordinated by the Rasmson Foundation and 49 Writers. The project pairs Alaskan writers with Rasmuson Foundation grant awardees. The result: a growing compilation of narrative-driven artist profiles of and by Alaskans.
Here’s an excerpt from my profile on composer Rick Zelinsky:
Ice cracks against the teeth of Rick Zelinsky’s crampons. A few yards ahead, the scrabbling of Koda’s toenails signal the Samoyed has found an area of windblown crust beginning to form on the final rise. “Look at that,” Zelinsky says to his dog. “Ascent No. 128.” The pair steps up onto the broad expanse of Peak Three overlooking Anchorage’s city lights. Together they pause. Their breathing slows.
“It’s a different world up here,” Zelinsky observes.
It’s also a different world when Zelinsky, a jazz saxophonist, writes a new composition. “When you create a tune, a jazz tune, you’re creating a planet,” he says. “And then when you improvise, you land on that planet and you explore it.” With different chords, rhythms and meters, Zelinsky and his jazz ensemble not only travel over and across new terrain — they create it as they go. “That’s what I love,” Zelinsky says. “I love exploring the mountains and music.”
Circumpolar Duet is a Yukon collaboration between ten word artists and ten visual artists. The process: we made our first round of arts independently, engaging the theme of “singular plurality.” Then the twenty of us came together to exchange words for vis and vis for words. In round two, we made our second contribution of word art or visual art in response to the specific piece we received in the exchange.
The result: twenty ekphrastic dialogues.
Thank you to supporters and organizers who arranged our ekphrastic pairings into a book compilation, and into a gallery exhibit hosted by Yukon Artists at Work.
“Circumpolar Duet: singular/plurality” exhibition featured 40 visual artists that were combined with literary poems and stories. It was truly a beautiful sensory experience, giving the viewer many sensations of colour, texture, 3D effects, even a slight remembrance of taste, within the artistic works and beautifully written works of literature. The exhibit was truly a representation of team work. Each of these artworks were combined in a collaboration of written works which were then reflected into the other artists choice of medium. It truly is an amazing experience to hear the stories come to life, through the various mediums that were show cased; paintings, drawings, pottery, photography, textiles, sewing and beadwork, among multi-media depictions of their reflections, within a circumpolar duet, coming to life. Hehn and Munro worked together to create the first Circumpolar Duet which was showcased in 2016, whom then wanted to bring back to life the experience of a circumpolar duet, after the theme was picked through the “the Government of Canada chose its role as the guest of honour country at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2020.”The visual artists taking part in the project are Nicole Bauberger, Marten Berkman, Heidi Hehn, Jackie Irvine, Astrid Kruse, Françoise La Roche, Leslie Leong, Lillian Loponen, Joyce Majiski and Martha Jane Ritchie.The participating literary artists are Ellen Bielawski, Corinna Cook, Lily Gontard, Jamella Hagen, Susanne Hingley, Ruth Lera, Joanna Lilley, Kirsten Madsen, Laurel Parry and Elisabeth Weigand. Circumpolar Duet is a collaboration by Yukon Artists @ Work and Yukon Writers’ Collective Ink.
The Artists of Alaska series is an ambitious, statewide project curated and coordinated by the Rasmson Foundation and 49 Writers. The project pairs Alaskan writers with Rasmuson Foundation grant awardees. The result: a growing compilation of narrative-driven artist profiles of and by Alaskans.
Here’s an excerpt from my profile on Alison Bremner:
Dancers become birds, become predators, become fish, become legendary characters. Drums pound. Voices rise and pulse. Knees bend and shoulders swoop so that blankets come alive. Arms fly out to strike angled postures — here a poised spear, there a wingtip, flight feathers angling in complicated winds.
The body: It is always the first site of transformation. It is where varying truths coincide. That is why Alison Bremner (née Marks) works with blades, wood and paint. She carves because of a dance.
Alaska Magazine’s special issue in creative writing includes my essay about heat, illness, the color red, and black spruce. The essay responds to a painting by Juneau artist Constance Baltuck.
Excerpt:
To understand the black spruce, remember it grows from a fist-sized root ball as grey and compact and crucial as a brain. Each black spruce spindles itself straight up into the crack of the cold, stout branches making a skyward scrub from base to apex all winter night. And below that brain of roots lies permafrost, even in summer. This, then, is a tree that keeps ice in mind.Full essay here.
Background photo credit: Jeremy Pataky.Fonts: Canada 1500 by Ray Larabie and Adobe Jenson Pro by Robert Slimbach.
