Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska [Hardcover]

Leslie Leyland Fields (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2002

Reminiscent of the best of Matthiessen, Dillard, and Erlich, Leslie Leyland Fields's Alaskan memoir is an inspiring narrative of life in the wild.

Surviving the Island of Grace is a beautiful and haunting memoir of a woman who left the East Coast and moved to Alaska looking for a new life. In brilliant prose, Leslie Fields tells her story of adapting to life on a wilderness island without running water, telephones, or other 20th century conveniences. Here, as a 20-year-old newlywed, she is immersed into the world of commercial salmon fishing. With an unflinching gaze, she explores the extremes that define her new life: the beauty and brutality of commercial fishing, the startling land and seascape around her, the isolation, the physical labor, the intensity of communal island life. Among these extremes, she must find her way from a young woman to wife, commercial fisherwoman, and mother. She explores as well, perhaps most eloquently of all, her unique New Hampshire childhood and its role in preparing her for her life in the bush.

With its dramatic Alaskan setting and moving narrative, Surviving the Island of Grace is a poetic and powerful book.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers with pioneer envy will get vicarious thrills from this high-energy memoir. With a keen eye for detail including the occasional stomach-turning description of dead marine life Fields delivers the lowdown on 23 years of commercial salmon fishing on a remote island off Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. In the summer of 1978, Fields, an East Coast literary type, gamely followed her fiance, Duncan, to his family's generations-old fish camp, where she was unceremoniously ushered into her new workplace: 42-degree water. Fields's unflinching descriptions of spending her first winter eight miles (by water) from the nearest human being and telephone (shared by 100 people) are enough to make the most diehard hermit yearn for company. Of the miserable inconveniences of daily life, she writes, "The first time I did laundry here, I cried. Secretly. And only after putting eight loads of grimy clothes and fish-fouled jeans through the same marinade of mud sloshing in a wringer washer that only partially worked... I knew only two basic categories [before] then: clean and dirty, black and white. [This] seemed a horrible perversion of both the symbol and reality of laundering." The only parts of this memoir that readers may question involve cameo appearances by Duncan, Fields's workaholic, emotionally distant husband, who ushers her back to the skiff 20 minutes after she has a miscarriage. Given her gutsy, capable spirit, it's surprising that our intrepid narrator never follows through on her threat to walk away. Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

To deem this solely a memoir of her life spent as the wife of a salmon fisherman on a remote Alaskan island would be missing the boat, so to speak, for Fields' powerful, poetic essays deal with themes as large as the great outdoors in which she struggles to make her way and find her place. Barely out of her teens, Fields marries Duncan, determined to share the life he loves, every backbreaking hour of it; sailing the open ocean in a tiny skiff, harvesting salmon the way it has always been done: dragging them in by nets, picking them out by hand. Just as Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, so, too, do the Fields live on this ocean, without electricity or telephones, with bears and eagles as their constant companions, choosing it as much for what it offers as for what it omits. Paying homage to man's flexibility and gratitude for God's grace, Fields' memoir is haunting in its imagery, uplifting in its message. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (October 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031229140X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312291402
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,798,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

LESLIE LEYLAND FIELDS is a writer, speaker and professional editor who lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska in the winter and Harvester Island in the summer, where she works in commercial salmon fishing with her family. She has written/edited 7 nonfiction books of memoir and essays on a variety of subjects, including the spirituality of food, wilderness, commercial fishing, and parenting. She loves to travel, and spent several years trekking around the world, through Asia, S.E. Asia, Africa, Europe, and Central America. She still travels often, leaving Kodiak to speak at conferences, churches, retreats, and universities around the country.

Leslie has written for many publications including The Atlantic, Orion, Image: Art, Faith Mystery, Beliefnet, Christianity Today (where she writes a column, "Stones to Bread") Christian Science Monitor, Books and Culture, and many others. Her essays have appeared in On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors; It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters; A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, and many others.

She has three graduate degrees in Creative Nonfiction, English and Journalism.
Leslie has taught for many years in both undergraduate and graduate programs in Oregon, Alaska and Washington and now continues to teach through college visits, frequent radio appearances, speaking, and her professional writing business, The Northern Pen.

Leslie and her husband Duncan have 6 children, a daughter and 5 sons, all of whom work in salmon fishing every summer. You can reach her at [e-mail]

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An island of reality and hard work., December 16, 2002

By 

Irving Warner (Fife, Washington, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska (Hardcover)

"Surviving the Island of Grace" by Leslie Leyland Fields opens up a world for the reader that few see in such frank, unyielding literary light. The author's practiced instinct enables her to construct "Grace" out of exceptionally strong stuff. She weaves together the tapestry of her story as a youngster, young woman, wife and mother. These segments of her life take us from her rigorous New England childhood, through post-oil spill Alaska. The sturdy, sure-lined threads of learning, working and growing into marriage are blended skillfully into the workscape of the Alaska setnetter--a form of salmon fishing where the fish come to the net, rather than the net to the fish.
It is all here--and I mean all, the harsh, ugly griminess of living in a remote summer fish camp. There is also love, good fellowship, learning and above all else, faith. Leyland Fields is a person of deep religious conviction. Her faith appears, for the most part, in tasteful doses, even for a non-religious reader such as myself.
There are too many Alaska books by "hit and run" authors, who live up north a few years, then write a book or three. In "Grace" Leyland-Fields engraves all of her two-decades plus Alaska living on every one of its 330 pages. This book's most conspicuous literary achievement is the genuine, ardent authority of the narrator's voice.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A savory meal, July 31, 2003

By 

David Lyons (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska (Hardcover)

I have just finished reading Surviving The Island Of Grace. I savored it really. I can read quickly when I am reading to collect information. But when I read for pleasure, I read very slowly. I stretched this savory meal over a couple of weeks.

The richly textured use of words drew me in, while the occassional terror of life on a wind swept island gripped me. The author is very honest, yet inspiring with her insights.

My wife was chiding me to finish, so that she could pick it up. She couldn't wait. For a few days there have been two bookmarks tracing their way through this rich and intimate memoir of life in a world very different from my own.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Love Letter to Alaska, April 23, 2005

By 

Carol J. Schweitzer (California, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska (Hardcover)

Since I am interested in going to Alaska for a vacation, I wanted to read something informative written by a resident. Leslie Fields did just that. In fact, I would love to stop by and see her when I go. This was truly a memoir and not just a bio. She very honestly and affectionately tells her story while leaving a written legacy for her children. I usually read fast, but I took this book on a Caribbean cruise this winter and took the whole two weeks to read it. It was an intereting contrast to where I was at the time. I particularly enjoyed hearing an insider's view of the Valdez oil spill. A very good book!