Narrow Road to the Deep North
A Journey Into the Interior of Alaska
By Katherine McNamara
304 pages, Literature and Essay / Travel
ISBN 978-1562791223
“The reader of this book takes up an account of a long journey, a physical and metaphysical journey, into a country of Imagination. That country is Alaska." So begins this extraordinary story of a young woman’s experiences among Athabaskan Indians in the interior of Alaska. A poet recently returned from the literary salons of Paris, the author takes a job teaching in a remote region of Alaska. As she comes to know the region and its peoples—as she learns to see the visible and invisible world around her—she finds herself more and more the student rather than the teacher.
A true story on an epic scale, told with a relentless realism that portrays Alaska and its people without romanticizing them, charged with a unique and informed intelligence, Narrow Road to the Deep North is the moving story of a woman’s path to knowledge in a remote and austere land.
Katherine McNamara is the publisher of Archipelago, an online literary journal. Her poetry and nonfiction have been widely published in journals and reviews. She lives in Virginia.