EDITORS | Martha Amore & Lucian Childs

PRESS

REVIEWS

“Queering the North”
by Trevor Corkum, Plentitude Magazine { MORE }

Book Review
by Robert Lipscomb, Western American Literature { MORE }

“Building Fires in the Snow an inspiration to authors of LGBTQ persuasion”
by Addley Fannin, The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner { MORE }

Book Review
by Erica Watson, Terrain
A terrific and thoughtful review focusing on the theme of the urban/wild intersection and queer communities in rural settings. { MORE }

Book Review
by Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Impossible Voices
Excellent review. Leslie Kimiko Ward, Kate Partridge, Vivian Faith Prescott and MoHagani Magnetek get special mentions. { MORE }

“Collection of LGBT fiction, poetry breaks ground but lacks diversity”
by Cinthia Ritchie, Anchorage Daily News
”C.S. Lewis supposedly said, ‘We read to know we are not alone.’ This quote beautifully captures the mood of the LGBT fiction and poetry collection Building Fires in the Snow." { MORE }

“Come Together”
by Lee Harrington, Anchorage Press
”Working on the Proposition 5 campaign fighting for basic civil rights for LGBTQ people in Anchorage, Martha Amore came face-to-face with the prejudice in our city. Her role involved cold-calling residents...” { MORE }

“Building Fires in the Snow: Edited by Martha Amore and Lucian Childs”
by Mike McClelland, Spectrum Culture
”Though it may seem that there is an anthology for everything these days, Building Fires in the Snow is truly unique: a collection of short fiction and poetry by LGBTQ Alaskans.” { MORE }

“A landmark addition to Alaskan writing”
By Chelsea Tremblay, The Capital City Weekly
”I was sitting on a mossy overlook watching Shakes Glacier up the Stikine River.” { MORE }

FEATURE ARTICLE

Alaska News Nightly: Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016
By Lori Townsend, Alaska Public Media
Stories and poetry that celebrate the urban wilderness interface in Alaska through the lens of LGBTQ writers is brought together in a new anthology called Building Fires in The Snow. Authors and editors Lucian Childs and Martha Amore helped bring it all together. The interview begins in the audio feed at 22:03. {MORE }

“Alaskan Queers go to the Lammys”
By Indra Arriaga, Anchorage Press
The evening of the 29th Lambda Literary Awards or Lammys, June 12, 2017, was a highly anticipated event because for the first time in history, an Alaskan LGBTQ anthology made it as a finalist for the Best LGBTQ Anthology category. { MORE }

AUTHOR BLURBS

BRYAN BORLAND
Author of DIG & founding editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry

The poetry and fiction of "Building Fires in the Snow" stakes a queer claim, not necessarily to the untamable terrain of Alaska itself, but certainly to its unfolding story. These writers bear witness to long winters, frozen country, hard hearts, a rugged history, deep passion, quiet moments, a past brought to light, and a future not allowed to be exclusionary. "Building Fires in the Snow" is a beautiful, diverse, and much-needed map of uncharted territory: LGBTQ life in our wildest of states.

JERICHO BROWN
Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Tradition and The New Testament

"Building Fires in the Snow" is a large book of larger empathies, each and every character finding themselves made more whole in one another or in the natural world around them. This volume proves Alaska is not just the land of snow; like all other landscapes, it is rife with the possibility of romantic desire, of unbearable grief, of “breath fasted on dream.” Let us see the state of literature made new by this state’s brilliant writers.

DAVID GESSNER
Author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West

The Alaskan writing cliché of the rugged white hetero male battling the wilderness is dead, and as it turns out its corpse makes a fine hummus, and good fertilizer, for what comes next. What comes next, I think, is "Building Fires in the Snow," a book that, like nature itself, prizes diversity, and is full of stories of the urban and the rural, the domestic and the wild, the human—in its many flavors—and the animal, and all of it told on the vast, varied and glorious stage that is Alaska. This is just the kind of vision we need to start a new conversation about wilderness, what it means to be human and how we can lead authentic lives in an increasingly inauthentic world.

EOWYN IVEY
Author of To the Bright Edge of the World and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Snow Child

A complex and moving portrait of Alaskans. In these short stories and poems, we find joy and love, loneliness, fear, transgression and forgiveness, and we are poignantly reminded that labels can never encompass all the beautiful variations of humanity. What does it mean to be Alaskan? Begin with Jerah Chadwick’s stunning poem "Winter Country." From there on, page by page, this collection shows the depth and talent of Alaska’s literary community.

JOAN NAVIYUK KANE
Winner of the 2009 Whiting Award, the 2014 American Book Award and author of Hyperboreal and Cormorant Hunter’s Wife

A compelling anthology dwells in possibility. And this first effort to yoke together voices—of those that may or may not be Alaskan, LGBTQ, or even writers—offer solidarity of a kind. A possibility for this book may be that the voices that are not included in this collection—the voices, for instance, of Alaska's many indigenous LGBTQ poets, storytellers, and thinkers raised in the context of our identities as Native people marginalized and made invisible in our homelands—may find the courage in times to come to have their word similarly collected and championed.

DON REARDEN
Author of The Raven’s Gift

"Building Fires in the Snow" burns away any preconceptions we might have about the modern Alaskan LGBTQ world with the fury of a forest fire. Quite simply, it is a book about life, living, and love. This book is a force of strength and resilience of inspired and powerful writing from the gifted voices of our Alaskan friends, our family, our neighbors.

PEGGY SHUMAKER
Former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of Gnawed Bones and Just Breathe Normally

Alaska LGBTQ lives in all their complexity, richness, anguish, and curiosity—that’s what these poems and stories give us. This book widens our awareness of human struggles, adventures, and astonishing daily living. Fire in snow—yes!—thanks to these radiant Alaska writers.

FRANK SOOS
Flannery O'Connor Award winner and former Alaska State Writer Laureate

Not so long ago an anthology of LGBTQ writing by Alaskans and speaking to the Alaskan experience might have seemed beyond imagining. But in "Building Fires in the Snow," Lucian Childs and Martha Amore have built a collection both extraordinary and ordinary. Extraordinary for its breadth and quality of the poetry and prose. Ordinary in the aesthetic that pervades the collection, people living their lives in emotionally honest and complex ways. There’s something for every reader in Building Fires in the Snow, a book to keep near at hand and to digest slowly and enjoy.

RONALD SPATZ
Editor, Alaska Quarterly Review

Richly diverse and honest, there’s much to like in this rewarding collection of poems and stories of lived experience.

DEB VANASSE
Author of Cold Spell and Wealth Woman

Like Alaska itself, "Building Fires in the Snow" defies easy pigeonholing. Whatever you might expect, this collection of LGBTQ short fiction and poetry will surprise, which is reason enough to add it to your library. Eclectic, original, and thought-provoking, it makes a unique and important contribution to Alaska’s literary landscape.

DAVID VANN
2010 Prix Médicis étranger winner and author of Legend of a Suicide, Goat Mountain, and Caribou Island

The first story of this fine anthology, Luke, is as local and Alaskan as a story can be. Here's what it feels like to be a fisherman, and what it feels like to miss another man. Geology, another story, is a beautiful meditation on a woman's desire and obligation, remorse and momentum and long love, against a backdrop of longer time. These are subtle, artful reflections that will place you, for a moment, in Alaska and deeper wildernesses as well. Essential reading if you want to know Alaska.