“As you can tell, indigenous people are Chekov-like:
our stories don’t necessarily end when or where you want them to end.
Sometimes, Raven is still the trickster,
waiting with us to see where things go, how they end up.”
our stories don’t necessarily end when or where you want them to end.
Sometimes, Raven is still the trickster,
waiting with us to see where things go, how they end up.”
Sometimes when I pick out a book to read, the choosing feels like dipping into a stream of potential and fishing something out by chance. If I’m lucky, it’s a catch. If not, I throw it back—there are plenty more where that came from. But sometimes, a book picks me. This is a great kindness on the part of the book—a bit of navigational magic, a nudge from the universe. “This is what you need,” it seems to say. It picks me because I have been waiting—so, so long—for it to tell me what it knows, because I have been full of questions and haven’t known where to find the answers. The Dead Go to Seattle, a novel-in-stories by Vivian Faith Prescott, is one of those books. It picked me because I needed it to save my heart.
The concept is simple: citizens of Wrangell, Alaska tell their personal stories, family secrets, and folktales to a researcher from the Smithsonian Institute, ethnologist John Swanton. Over time, these stories overlap and pick up strands and roots that cross generations and shape a community and its shared sense of history and place. Tlingit and Scandinavian myths twine together in a context of white American colonialism to create a complex portrait of a people living at the crossover point of multiple cultures, eras, and versions of history—an estuary of stories. The conceit of the book is that the ferry that carries Swanton to and from the island is a time machine, never really leaving Wrangell but shuttling him instead forward and backward in time; he is stranded there for over a century, collecting tales from elders and subsequent generations. The execution of this effect—making this all seem natural, the stories relevant and their significance emergent, and each story able to stand on its own—is anything but simple. One of the problems with real talent is that it makes whatever it’s doing look easy. Writing like Prescott’s—imaginative, political, gently layering story after interlocking story to create a kaleidoscopic effect that moves nonlinearly through time—is anything but easy. Each story creeps up on the reader like a sneaker wave, lulling with rhythmic language and an enchanting blend of stark hyperrealism and folklore. When the impact hits, it drags the reader from their feet. This kind of relentless excellence can be, frankly, tiring to read. It’s the kind of book that I had to set aside several times because it made me never want to write again. Prescott does what I try to do—tell the inner stories of Alaska in all of its beauty and hideous contradictions—but she does so far better, far more completely and gracefully than I knew was possible. At the same time, the book isn’t perfect, but rather than those flaws detracting from its effect, they serve to amplify it, to draw the reader’s attention even closer. It’s like a tightrope walker who slips from time to time, reminding us that it isn’t easy. It could all come crashing down at any moment, and so we thrill anew to every second they get it right. I grew up fishing out of Kodiak, a queer woman on an Alaskan island—just like Prescott. But due to my family’s seasonal work in the salmon fishery and my schooling in the lower forty-eight, my own experience of Alaska was less rooted than hers. My folks were adventurous white kids who found their way up north from the Midwest and Washington; they worked their way through canneries until they owned a boat. We fished commercially around Kodiak island for decades, but we did so only during the salmon runs, and only to make a living. We were the colonizers, in effect. |
As a child, I was formed by my intuitive sense of Alaska, by my contact with the waves and the birds and the seaweed, and with the misogynist outlaw culture that arises in a transitory fleet, but I had no framework for the feelings and meanings that arose. We were there to work, not to reflect. And so my understanding and my tie to my island was episodic and restless, grounded in objects and sensory experiences rather than a historical connection to the place.
When asked about Alaska by folks who have never been, I would always say that the experience is one of overwhelming wildness. I was baptized in the sensation of wild other—the feeling of being completed submersed in, but also utterly unrecognized by, a deep and untouched Nature. Alaska felt inhuman to me, and indifferent to human history. But Prescott reminds me that this is not the case. Humans are there, are integral to the place, and have been for ten thousand years or more—just not my people. I lack the roots to feel what they feel, to be a part of that deep Nature. More importantly, I lack the stories. In Prescott’s book, stories are more than things to be collected. They are currency. They create the world in real time. Each individual has stories that only they know, and these stories link them to the older, bigger stories that move mountains and pull tides, native stories of Raven and Bear, and of the landotter people who pull humans under the waves, whose Lingít name is taboo. There are stories of town fires, which in turn are stories of dragons, and of mountains, and of immigration and childhood and religion and fear. There are stories of aliens, which are stories of neglect and abandonment, of kidnapping, of deer hunting and lights and resurrection. There are stories of women who turn into salmon and swim away to the sea. There are stories of women being beaten for being gay, stories of what is taken from Indigenous people, stories of how stories are stolen. In Prescott’s book, stories are more than things to be collected. They are currency. This book does what great novels do—it plays with ideas in both form and content, and each reflects the other. Each of Prescott’s stories can be read on its own, discovered as a snippet of a life—some lives told only to highlight the magic of habits, to find joy in the quotidian and mundane. Over lives, other stories dive straight into the deep end and offer up everyday shapeshifters, shamans, and gods.
As the novel progresses, characters are seen time and again at different ages, their lives revealed from the angles of their lovers, their mothers, their children. The meaning making is emergent, revealing itself over time and with great patience. As one character observes of a newcomer, “Wait fifteen years or so and, if you’re still here, we might accept you as one of us. Maybe.” And the same goes for the reader. One could pick up the book as a tourist and read any given chapter and feel awash in the sensory and cultural atmosphere of a small Alaskan island community—the outboard motor skiffs, the rubber boots, the fireweed, the bars. The tourist-reader might even feel like they had gathered a postcard to take home with them, a tidbit of insight or an image to tell them what Alaska is all about. But if the reader stays and reads them all, a very different world will emerge. They will run into countering tales and contradictions; they will see the story change over time and become something else entirely. |
Even the image of Alaska would shift—the mountain may crumble, the land collapse, buildings burn and wash away with the tide. The act of storytelling itself, and the exchange of stories, is the story.
The conceit of the book—the time machine ferry, the complex overlap of past and future in the end—isn’t necessary. It could just as easily have been framed as a book of transcripts found in the cargo hull of an abandoned ship; the bumbling ethnographer adds little to the real arc of the book. But at the same time, these tortuous devices don’t hurt it. They add strangeness for its striving. Potential readers are advised to see beyond the cover, as well. With its rusting hulls in dry dock and its white titles fading to grey, it looks at once over-clever and depressing, more like a gritty tell-all memoir than a collection of myth-driven stories, a look that in no way represents the imagination of its insides. This is far more than a boat book. Each story creeps up on the reader like a sneaker wave, lulling with rhythmic language and an enchanting blend of stark hyperrealism and folklore. The lineage Prescott traces through her characters gives it the resonance of ancestral memory, at once inescapable and filled with the wisdom of having been there before, along with a story to remind one how to act. As the world unravels in the final chapters—whether due to climate change or a collapsing battle of narratives is unclear—the interwoven threads become messier, the taut sense of overlap and causality begins to fall apart. From one perspective, the author has dropped the threads. The reader becomes confused. Yet even here, she reminds us, “She resists stories with beginnings, stories with a middle motivation, and an end that makes sense, a story so clear you can see a salmon egg on the bottom of the stream. Warning: These stories are not fairy tales. These stories are not for children.”
This book makes me realize how little I know of the Alaska that shaped me, how little I will know—and if the world is to make sense, we must gather our stories for ourselves, of ourselves, as if it is the most crucial act of our lives. The Dead Go to Seattle is more than just a remarkable book giving voices to those whose stories we seldom hear, those in crossroads communities far from the common stream. It honors the complexity with which we shape each other. It is a reminder that our narratives create the world. REVIEWED BY LARA MESSERSMITH-GLAVIN
Lara Messersmith-Glavin is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. Her nonfiction work focuses on women, nature, science, language, and mythology--including her forthcoming memoir on growing up in the Alaskan fishing industry, SPIRIT THINGS. She also serves on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and edits their house journal, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. When she's not at a desk or in the classroom, she can be found performing onstage with other Fisherpoets, exploring the woods with her child, or swinging kettlebells at the gym where she coaches. Check out her work at queenofpirates.net. |