ASP Podcast #24: Lara Messersmith-Glavin, "Spirit Things"
Lara Messersmith-Glavin
“Spirit Things”, University of Alaska Press
Larsen Bay, Kodiak Island
Duncan Kowalski photo
Cannery at Larsen Bay, Kodiak Island
Duncan Kowalski photo
Listen to Lara and Dan with your favorite podcast player, or via Apple Podcasts
This podcast features the work of author, editor, and teacher, and FisherPoet, Lara Messersmith-Glavin. In each essay from her recently published book, "Spirit Things", Lara holds an object or detail from her early life aboard the family's Kodiak seiner and then takes us beyond into realms of history, science and story.
In the Introduction to "Spirit Things", Lara writes, 'When we live with things, imbue them with use and care, when they become extensions of our bodies to work, to create, to touch the world, they take on their own quiet power. I like magical objects and the histories they carry inside of them."
Lara reads Chapter 4, 'Wave'
Early Kodiak reflections of living in a liminal zone between an ever-bright sky and a dark horror of water
"It was many years before I learned to put up barriers between myself and this terrible feeling of limitlessness."
Norse seafarers and their use of naming and stories with which to engage the immensity of the sea
Reflecting on modern means of navigation: charts and GPS
Polynesian means of navigation: "This way of knowing the waves, of seeing forces that are invisible to the eye, represents an entirely different form of understanding from the charts and equipment... It was an experiential form of knowledge in which the cognitive structures are of actions and tendencies, ways of interpreting shifting conditions in the moment rather than mental maps of places or things."
Lara reads Chapter 9, ‘Shell’
"When the land and the ocean meet, they speak with many voices and arrive in many moods."
Beachcombing: "It's about being there, on the edge of the infinite, staring out into the closest thing to a straight line that nature has to offer, the water horizon."
A story of how Lara's parents met in Kodiak and the loss, overboard, of a precious wedding ring
Fotsam, getsam, lagan, derelict. Plastics: The Pacific Trash Vortex
Atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, Ocean Acidification, mollusks, crustaceans
Shells on the beach a century from now? "As with what we scavenge, what we choose to protect says so much about us, about what we value and find precious and worth rescuing."
Lara's website: https://www.queenofpirates.net
Special thanks to Christian Arthur for original music
Alaska Story Project Podcast #7 with Lara
Fresh readings from the pre-covid FisherPoets gathering
An excerpt from Spirit Things, from Chapter 4, Wave
“In the northern reaches of the Arctic, far beyond the outline of Kodiak Island that I both knew well and didn't know at all, the Inuit people have found their way through snow and sea fog, through seemingly endless and featureless landscapes too close to magnetic north to trust a compass. They have done this in part through intimate understanding of the land and its inhabitants, the sounds of wind, the patterns of current and snowdrift, the behaviors of animals, the smells. Aangaittuaq, they call those who navigate well, “attentive.” And this attention is cultivated and taught as an attitude and way of life, not just as a skill set used to find one’s way home after hunting. Navigators are seen as cultural teachers. They often spend times of rest helping novices practice describing locations, orienting themselves and others through a collective understanding of place.”