Praise for Building Fires in the Snow

Not so long ago an anthology of LGBTQ writing by Alaskans and speaking to the Alaska experience might have seemed beyond imagining. But in Building Fires in the Snow, Lucian Childs and Martha Amore have built a collection both extraordinary and ordinary. Extraordinary for its breadth and quality of the poetry and prose. Ordinary in the aesthetic that pervades the collection, people living their lives in emotionally honest and complex ways. There’s something for every reader in Building Fires in the Snow, a book to keep near at hand and to digest slowly and enjoy.

Frank Soos, professor Emeritus of English at University of Alaska Fairbanks

The first story of this fine anthology, “Luke,” is as local and Alaskan as a story can be. Here’s what it feels like to be a fisherman, and what it feels like to miss another man. Geology, another story, is a beautiful meditation on a woman’s desire and obligation, remorse and momentum and long love, against a backdrop of longer time. These are subtle, artful reflections that will place you, for a moment, in Alaska and deeper wildernesses as well. Essential reading if you want to know Alaska.

David Vann, winner of 2010 Prix Medicis Etranger and author of Legend of a Suicide, Goat Mountain, and Caribou Island

A compelling anthology dwells in possibility. And this first effort to yoke together voices—of those that may or may not be Alaskan, LGBTQ, or even writers—offer solidarity of a kind. A possibility for this book may be that the voices that are not included in this collection—the voices, for instance, of Alaska’s many indigenous LGBTQ poets, storytellers, and thinkers raised in the context of our identities as Native people marginalized and made invisible in our homelands—may find the courage in times to come to have their word similarly collected and championed.

Joan Naviyuk Kane, winner of the 2009 Whiting Award, the 2014 American Book Award, and author of Hyperboreal and The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife

Richly diverse and honest, there’s much to like in this rewarding collection of poems and stories of lived experience.

Ronald Spatz, editor, Alaska Quarterly Review

The Alaska writing cliché of the rugged white hetero male battling the wilderness is dead, and as it turns out its corpse makes a fine hummus, and good fertilizer, for what comes next. What comes next, I think, is Building Fires in the Snow, a book that, like nature itself, prizes diversity, and is full of stories of the urban and the rural, the domestic and the wild, the human—in its many flavors—and the animal, and all of it told on the vast, varied and glorious stage that is Alaska. This is just the kind of vision we need to start a new conversation about wilderness, what it means to be human, and how we can lead authentic lives in an increasingly inauthentic world.

David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West

Like Alaska itself, Building Fires in the Snow defies easy pigeonholing. Whatever you might expect, this collection of LGBTQ short fiction and poetry will surprise, which is reason enough to add it to your library. Eclectic, original, and thought-provoking, it makes a unique and important contribution to Alaska’s literary landscape.

Deb Vanasse, author of Cold Spell and Wealth Woman

The poetry and fiction of Building Fires in the Snow stakes a queer claim, not necessarily to the untamable terrain of Alaska itself, but certainly to its unfolding story. These writers bear witness to long winters, frozen country, hard hearts, a rugged history, deep passion, quiet moments, a past brought to light, and a future not allowed to be exclusionary. Building Fires in the Snow is a beautiful, diverse, and much-needed map of uncharted territory: LGBTQ life in our wildest of states.

Bryan Borland, author of DIG & founding editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry