Survival
Stories by Nancy Lord

"There are as many ways of responding to Alaska as there are regions on the map and people to live there. Nancy Lord has chosen her place, her inevitable subject, with all of its complications - its permanent nature and its strangely transitory human effects, its ordinariness as well as its mystery - and has written about it with a matured understanding. We are richer for her work and for her presence among us." - John Haines

"A generation of wonderful story tellers is coming of age in Alaska. Nancy Lord is one of the best. In Survival she shows us ourselves in a beautiful, complex mirror, yearning for useful lives in paradise." - William Kittredge

"Nancy Lord’s lucid prose style captures the loneliness and grandeur, the squalor and pathos of life in our northernmost state. This is a Baedeker for every armchair traveler." - Maxine Kumin

In the title story, "Survival," a longtime Alaskan resident watches on as Bonnie, a newcomer, slowly withdraws into the isolated wilderness of a nearby island. In "The Bucket of Mice," a vacationing husband realizes that there is more than physical distance between himself and his family. A woman clips salmon fins in a fish hatchery, in "Marks," as she ponders the brutal murder of a college acquaintance. These stories present a woman’s perspective on the wilderness vision that Alaskan life conjures, with well-voiced subtlety and irony.

Nancy Lord received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA from Vermont College, and won the Alaska State Arts Council Short Fiction Prize for her first collection, The Compass Inside Ourselves, published by Fireweed Press. She has resided in Homer, Alaska, since 1973 and currently makes her living as a writer and commercial fisherman.

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