Melinda Moustakis

 

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The Writer’s Story: 3:30PM,

The Garfield Book Company

Reading: 7PM,

The Regency Room

 

 

Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. She received her MA from UC Davis and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Bear Down Bear North, her first book, won the 2010 Flannery O' Connor Award in Short Fiction and the UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, The Massachusetts Review, and American Short Fiction and five of her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at PLU.

 

 

On Bear Down, Bear North:

In her debut collection, Melinda Moustakis brings to life a rough-and-tumble family of Alaskan homesteaders through a series of linked stories. Born in Alaska herself to a family with a homesteading legacy, Moustakis examines the near-mythological accounts of the Alaskan wilderness. The characters in Bear Down, Bear North are salt-tongued fishermen, fisherwomen, and hunters, scrappy storytellers who put themselves in the path of destruction—sometimes a harsh snowstorm, sometimes each other—and live to tell the tale.

 

Praise for Melinda Moustakis:

Bear Down Bear North has a tooth-and-claw sensibility that brings to mind Jim Harrison and Elwood Reid. Immediately I was lost in the hard poetry of the sentences, lost in the wilds of Alaska, lost under the whiskey spell of a writer who knows how to wield a knife, a rifle, a fishing reel as well as she does her sharply honed language. I am completely in love with the stories of Melinda Moustakis.

   —Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding

 

Here is a writer who truly has everything—clean and radiant prose; unforgettable characters; formal designs for story after story that are innovative yet utterly readable. All of this happens, moreover, in a thrilling setting, on Alaskan homesteads and waterways where beauty and danger color even the most ordinary day. Moustakis’ women are brave and tough, but full of heart in every sense of the term. Her men can do everything the wilderness asks of them, except love themselves enough to stop drinking. Bear Down Bear North will be an indispensable collection, not only to read but to teach.

   —Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule

 

Excerpt from “This One Isn’t Going To Be Afraid”:

She’s nineteen years old and pregnant with me.  She’s nineteen years old and pregnant with me and waiting at the bus stop and it’s fifty below in Fairbanks. 

 

One of these times, she rides the bus to a job interview for a secretarial position. She and my father had twenty-three dollars to their name. “They wanted me to do a typing test,” she says. “So right there I chewed off my fingernails—every one. I spit them into the trash can while the lady in the suit watched.” 

 

Now she keeps her nails long, just past elegant, and paints them blood red to match her lipstick.  Mine are like hers, so tough it hurts to clip them, but I keep mine short.  There’s the woman in red lipstick, sitting around the campfire, watching the sun slink down on Mount McKinley.  A cigar glows in her mouth. She made the fire, swung an axe and cut the spruce down to size.”  And I didn’t break a sweat,” she says. She fans out her fingers over the flames.  “Or a nail.”