NEWS - April 2024 !!!!!!

With a grateful nod to the woods and the kitchen, Mary and Kari Odden offer Upcountry Cranberry, a cookbook devoted to lingonberry (lowbush cranberry) recipes, with 44 unique recipes and more than 80 photos, along with lingonberry facts, stories, and poems. Softcover ISBN 9798218290672. Matte lamination, heavyweight color pages. Here are some ways to buy. Look for more information and photos below.

COMING PDQ! —When the off-set press copies* of Upcountry Cranberry get here—by May 2024—you will be able to purchase those copies on this website. In the meantime, in Alaska, look for Upcountry Cranberry at local gift and book shops, or order directly from Mary Odden (907)822-3727.

For books sold here or otherwise direct from the author, a percentage of the income will be donated to WISE, the Wrangell Institute for Science and the Environment — an organization that conducts activities in our local schools, communities, and beyond. Check them out at www.wise-edu.org

If you are not in Alaska, or you live a ways from a store, you can always buy the a high-quality POD* copy of the cookbook at the BookBaby store:

Or, if you must : ), order from Amazon. The upside: Amazon orders remind that behemoth to keep copies on their shelves:

For Booksellers, and Libraries, Upcountry Cranberry is available at wholesalers including Ingram Content Group and Baker & Taylor.

IMPORTANT: because Booksellers can get upcountry cranberry from wholesalers, you can request the book from your favorite brick and mortar bookstore even if you don’t see it on the shelf — Thanks!

*All copies of Upcountry Cranberry are First Edition. The difference between the POD printing and the off-set press version sold directly by the author (same ISBN) is high-quality digital versus high-quality mechanical press. You might not be able to tell the difference. Both are beautiful.

Below are a few sample pages from the book.


A new article: “Blackberry Killers,” a piece sparked by a day with Sis Shawn Looney and others taking down invasive Blackberry canes in an Oregon park, is in About Place Journal, volume VII, Issue IV, October 2023 (online journal).


We have exciting news about Tiny’s Stories: An Athabascan Family on the Yukon River, a book Kari and I edited and designed for Tiny’s husband Jack Devlin and her daughter Jacklynn (and many new friends we met during the project). It has been published by Cirque Press, an Anchorage publisher of Alaska and northwest books. Cirque represents a community of people who share knowledge and opportunities generously, so we are thrilled that Tiny’s book has found a home there. The book may be up on the website now, or very soon:

https://cirquejournal.com/cirque-press-books/

You can read about Tiny Demientieff Devlin and the stories of her childhood with her family on the Yukon River on my website blog here, under the “Neighbors” tab.


Mostly Water: Reflections Rural and North

Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press - June 2, 2020 - Order it below, plus view book trailer and events.

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From women cowboys to arctic villages, Mary Odden’s linked essays transport the reader along light-filled paths at the top of a shrinking world.

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.

Order Mostly Water

. . . from Bookshop.org (earns money for independent brick and mortar bookstores—built into your purchase of a book) Or you can ask for it at your favorite local bookseller!

Mostly Water is also available from Barnes & Noble or Amazon and other online retailers.

Watch Book Trailer Video for Mostly Water:

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/bnceam62vys
…includes photos by Tom Evans, Terry Anderson, Judy Ferguson. Thanks!

Praise for Mostly Water

“Mary Odden's authentic, profound, and original Mostly Water will thaw parts of you you didn't even know had frozen. Love, work, animals, food, music: were we to disappear, humanity could be remade of the ingredients here set forth by this remarkable writer. Suffused with wonder, steeped in memory, and written in exquisitely musical prose, the essays in this book serve to harmonize head with heart in a way that can only be called wisdom.” 
— Richard Hoffman, Author of Half the House and Love & Fury

“Mary Odden’s essays are a wonder. I don’t know what I enjoy most about them, whether it is the clear-eyed re-creation of people and places, the rich music of her language or—and maybe this is where I take the deepest pleasure as I read—those astounding paragraphs where Mary turns to her readers and offers all the gathered insights and ideas her essays have to share. At such moments, I am dazzled by a person of genius who can lead me out into fresh and surprising turns of thought.” 
— Frank Soos, Author of Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions

“Mary Odden’s writing is wise, witty, and frank. This western woman’s memoir in essays brims with love for family and the rural places Odden calls home. She’s a natural storyteller, and her voice makes her literary kin to the North’s spiritual grand dame, Margaret Murie.”  
— Heather Lende, Author of Find the Good

Details

REVIEWS

Review of Mostly Water in Anchorage Daily News, June 14: “Journey to Interior Alaska and its Peopled Past…”:

https://www.adn.com/arts/books/2020/06/13/journey-to-interior-alaska-and-its-peopled-past-with-this-joyful-lyrical-memoir/

Review of Mostly Water by Denali Sunrise Publication’s Lisa Alexia: “Stories that Connect…” https://denalisunrisepublications.com/review-mostly-water-mary-odden/

Here’s a short but sweet review of the Mostly Water book from Foreword Reviews: “Love in the Time of Coronavirus: Two Essay Collections”: https://www.forewordreviews.com/articles/article/book-love-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-two-essay-collections/

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recorded events from the Mostly Water Book Launch Year:

Podcast of “Finding a Shared Home in a Threatened World,” a Forum with the Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on September 27, 2020 can be found at www.anchorageuuf.org homepage. Go to Forum Podcasts, bottom left of page.

Montana Book Festival Panel: The Earth’s Story is Also Our Story, Part Two: Ethics, the Environment, and Non-Fiction: Essayists Mary Odden (Mostly Water) and John Rember (A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World) in conversation with memoirists Kendra Atleework (Miracle Country) and Joanna Pocock (Surrender) about their 2020 releases. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5iB7QE-9Vs

Here’s a link to the June 2, 2020 KCHU Terminal Radio Coffee Break program interview about Mostly Water, with host Shane Kimberlin: https://m.soundcloud.com/kchu-public-radio/coffee-break-622020-mary-odden

Here’s a link to my virtual book launch on June 10, 2020, sponsored by the Homer Bookstore. I was joined in discussion by Jeremy Pataky, Peggy Shumaker, Frank Soos, Corinna Cook and Lisa Alexia and Red Hen’s Tobi Harper. It was hella-fun and is now bittersweet for me to re-visit, because Frank isn’t with us now. You can watch a recording on Red Hen Press’s Youtube channel. Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlErDgQRKbA 



neighbors blog posts - Take a look at the Garden around me

Writing and music and art are gardens and our lives are fertile ground.


About the Mostly Water book cover art and artist

An image of Sara Tabbert’s beautiful “Small Mystery,” one of her linocut and woodcut prints with painted acrylic, graces the cover of Mostly Water. Sara is a printmaker and mixed media artist from Fairbanks, Alaska. In addition to her smaller carved and painted pieces, Sara’s large-scale public art commissions can be found throughout Alaska and beyond. View the art and learn about Sara at her website: www.saratabbert.com