Narrow Road to the Deep North: A Journey into the Interior of Alaska

by Katherine Mcnamara

Release Date: March, 2001

Edition: Paperback

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We Dreamed that the Animals Were Weeping

"I wanted to learn this: how I could tell a story and tell truth" With those words poet and teacher Katherine McNamara joins her voice with those who are called to experience and ponder the sacred in an information driven age.

Trained in Paris during the glory days of structural anthropology, McNamara set out in the mid 1970's to find her own "pensee sauvage" in Alaska. The great land responded by inviting her into a world which while more materially primitive than Paris displayed a far more profound emotional intelligence. In Alaska she found love, death, mystery, the great attention to the ordinary which is both the poet's burden and her gift. She saw literary culture bump heads against an older kind of storytelling, the kind of stories which teach us how to be human, the sacred stories, Akhmatova and Mandelstam stories. She writes courageously about her own lack of understanding. She wonders why we ourselves live in a culture too "advanced" to trust the ancient wisdom of dreams.

A Narrow Road to the Deep North is a profound celebration of earth sacredness. We stand at a crossroads where we will either understand that the animals, the earth and ourselves to be a single organism, or we will drown in the toxic oil spill of technology and greed. That is the great tension in Alaska, both when McNamara lived there and today, when the Bush Administration wants to rip up the fragile tundra.

But Narrow Road is no polemic. It is first and foremost a work of poetry. Thanks to the author for the care and courage to share it with us.