Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Village

Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Village

by Carolyn Kremers
Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Village

Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Village

by Carolyn Kremers

Paperback(First Edition, New edition, soft cover)

$16.95 
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Overview

Place of the Pretend People is a vivid, sensitive account of one woman's choice to live and teach in a Yup'ik Eskimo village and later to make her home in Interior Alaska. A fascinating and unusual memoir, Carolyn Kremers' book is both a journey of cultural discovery and a story of spiritual and artistic seeking.The author offers readers an intimate encounter with Yup'ik culture, modern and traditional, as she describes teaching music and English in Tununak, a village tucked along the windswept Bering Sea coast of Western Alaska. Kremers' experiences in Tununak and elsewhere provide keen insight into the lives and land of the people she grows to love. Through her friendships with Yup'ik people and others, some of the mysteries of life in a challenging northern environment are unraveled, and she begins to understand some of the mysteries within her own heart.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780882408552
Publisher: TURNER PUB CO
Publication date: 09/01/2011
Edition description: First Edition, New edition, soft cover
Pages: 250
Sales rank: 1,125,797
Product dimensions: 5.92(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

A Colorado native, Carolyn Kremers wanted to live in the Alaskan bush. She accepted an invitation to teach music and English at a school in a remote Yup'ik Eskimo village on Nelson Island, in Western Alaska on the Bering Sea. After teaching for two years in the village of Tununak, she moved to Alaska's Interior, and today she teaches writing and literature part-time at the Universityof Alaska Fairbanks.

 Kremers earned undergraduate degrees in English and honors humanities from Stanford Universityand in flute performance from Metropolitan State College in Denver, Colorado.  She completed her teaching credential at the Universityof Illinois Chicago, and she holds an MFA in creative writing from the Universityof Alaska Fairbanks.

 Early in her career, Kremers received a special citation from the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for emerging women writers of nonfiction.  Since then, her essays and poems have appeared on public radio, on the Internet, and in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies.  In 2008-09, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Ulan Ude, Russia.  She lives in a log cabin in a birch forest outside Fairbanks.

 

Read an Excerpt

Months later, I would hike up the hill to the north on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, past the place where Mark said perhaps two sod houses used to be. About a mile away, up among the jumbled rocks displaced by permafrost, I would reach the Pretend People.

Eight stacks of stones—-flat, lichen-covered rocks placed neatly on top of one another—-kept watch on the mountainsde and gazed out at the Bering Sea. Cliffs rose fro the beach below and sometimes, walking along the shore at low tide, I would see a peregrine falcon soar above my head and disappear in the cliff shadows, returning to a nest.

from Chapter Three, Give Thanks, The Place of the Pretend People.

 

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