Mostly Water

Paperback | 2 June 2020

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In Mostly Water, essays form a linked memoir that explores the American outback from eastern Oregon horse trails to the arctic and subarctic river towns of Alaska. In these landscapes, Native people and later-comers are entwined in histories as loopy as northern rivers. Odden invites the reader to a vivid patchwork of characters and seldom-seen places, with a soundtrack from fiddle dances and a menu "half-potlatch and half-potluck." In Mostly Water, readers will hear dance music ring through little towns and watch as friends conspire to stoke the fires and fading memories of an old pioneer. The danger of giving birth takes a crooked path through a mystical elk hunt on its way to the miracle of holding a child. Casual meetings with passengers on an Inside Passage ferry open to intimacy with a Tlingit grandmother and the dignified depths of an ocean-going hobo. Bush town storefronts forsake their rivers to welcome the airplane. The falling of the Twin Towers on 9/11 silences the sky over a remote Alaskan village. Short takes on a vivid personal cuisine divide the longer essays of Mostly Water. In these interludes, dead grandmothers mix it up over turkey gravy and ripe berries are sweet and dangerous after Chernobyl's radioactive winds blow around the top of the Earth. Events of the churning twenty-first century rise like the sea in these stories--but so do music and love and hope in the precious otherness of nature.

Industry Reviews

"Mary Odden's essays are a wonder. I don't know what I enjoy most about them, whether it is the clear-eyed re-creation of people and places, the rich music of her language, or--and maybe this is where I take the deepest pleasure as I read--those astounding paragraphs where Mary turns to her readers and offers all the gathered insights and ideas her essays have to share. At such moments, I am dazzled by a person of genius who can lead me out into fresh and surprising turns of thought."
--Frank Soos, author of Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions

"Mary Odden's writing is wise, witty, and frank. This western woman's memoir in essays brims with love for family and the rural places Odden calls home. She's a natural storyteller, and her voice, especially in "Going to the Hills," about horsey childhood years in eastern Oregon, and "March," a meditation about what it means to be at home in Alaska (and so much more), makes her literary kin to the North's spiritual grand dame, Margaret Murie."
--Heather Lende, author of Find the Good

"Mary Odden's authentic, profound, and original Mostly Water will thaw parts of you you didn't even know had frozen. Love, work, animals, food, music: were we to disappear, humanity could be remade of the ingredients here set forth by this remarkable writer. Suffused with wonder, steeped in memory, and written in exquisitely musical prose, the essays in this book serve to harmonize head with heart in a way that can only be called wisdom."
--Richard Hoffman, author of Half the House and Love & Fury

Built upon each other with love, these anecdotes articulate connections between people, animals, land, sky, water, music, and memory. It's an intimate book, and not a skimmable one. Nuggets of humor and irony randomly appear like brown sugar in the most unexpected places, and you won't want to miss them.--Lisa Alexia, Denali Sunrise

In this series of spirited essays drawn from her singular life, Alaskan Mary Odden proves to be an exceptional writer, offering up portraits of the people and places that have shaped her wise and loving view of the world..."Mostly Water" is an especially welcome antidote to the discord and disruption of our current times, a reminder of the large and small pleasures to be found in friendships, families, and the unexpected.--Nancy Lord, Anchorage Daily News

Radio Interview with KCHU Sound and Valley News Radio

Author's Article featured in Alaska Magazine, November 2020 Issue

Featured in Anchorage Daily News favorite books of 2020.

Blog post on Mary's Midden

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