“Writing what I was living”

“Rivers and Ice: A Woman’s Journey Toward Family and Forgiveness” is a memoir by Homer writer Susan Pope. Published last March, Pope’s book is part adventure travel, filled with descriptive nature writing of time spent in and around Alaska and other places, and part reflections on her personal and family life.

Written in short chapters, each is from a different place or time period. The memoir follows Pope’s experiences chronologically, from the confusing times of childhood to midlife maneuvering to later years with an awareness of her own and others’ failings, and along with that, a movement toward understanding and forgiveness.

Pope’s title, “Rivers and Ice” refers to her love of wilderness adventure, time she has spent around ice rinks and the journey of loving family and then letting them go. Several chapters reference her numerous river trips through the years and others, her path as a grandmother, with one of her grandchildren a hockey player and another a competitive figure skater, and others, learning how to love her children and grandchildren and then let them make their own way.

“Rivers are difficult and the ice is hard and that is how you live as a family,” she said. “You accept your family and the family hopefully accepts you.”

The memoir begins on the Nigu River in the Gates of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on a trip she and her husband, photographer Jim Thiele, took.

“In this story, I share how I was not keeping up, was like a lame caribou trying to keep up with the other people on the trip,” Pope said. “At the same time, I’d fallen in love with the Arctic and was reflecting on my childhood in urban Alaska. I grew up hearing stories about the Arctic that convinced me that the terrain was too frigid, harsh and barren for a person as weak as I imagined myself to be.”

In the prologue of her book, Pope shares about her time working with the Alaska Association of Homes for Children. Then, she was a consultant to Alaska residential and outpatient facilities for children healing from trauma or recovering from emotional problems. Part of her work took her all over the state, including to the remote community of Utqiagvik, included training facility staff.

“My work drew me north across the Brooks Range,” she said. “As I flew above the changing hues and textures of the terrain, my eyes and heart began to open. Bright yellow-green buds gave way to red-tipped twigs, then to last summer’s smashed and faded grass, wind-drifted snow and finally, the great white fissures of the Arctic Ocean. The land held so much more than the stark imaginings of my childhood. I wanted more.”

In other stories, she shares her desire to simultaneously remain connected and break away from her family, to find her way differently than the roles she had been given growing up.

“I needed to break away from my family because my parents didn’t believe girls should go to college, but I was determined to go,” she said. “My dad wanted me to stay home and work beside him as an electrician, but I had other things I wanted to do.”

As she rewrote the individual pieces and put them together as a whole, Pope recognized the resentment she held against her family and the doubts she had about herself.

“Probably the most important piece of recognition in being a mother and grandmother was how hard those roles are and how I finally came to see that my parents did the best they could, having come to Alaska early in the 1950s and trying to make a go of it,” she said. “The process of pulling all my stories together helped me let go of a lot of the anger I carried during my life, finally forgiving them and myself for not being as competent, loving or perfect as I thought we all should have been. One family member told me that my book helped her put some missing pieces together about our family. She also told me that I was a role model to her in how to become an independent woman. That knocked my socks off.”

Toward the end of the book, Pope returns to the property her parents bought decades ago on Nancy Lake. After her father died, the cabin disintegrated into an irreparable state and three generations of the family took on the task of tearing down the cabin and building a new one. After her mother died, that cabin also fell into disrepair. One winter day, Pope skied to the cabin alone.

“The door had been broken into and someone in the family had patched a padlock on it,” Pope said. “When I entered, I found a picture my father had taken as a young man new to Alaska on his first sheep hunt. This was the father I carried with me, the man who before his drinking and health problems paused to capture a moment of beauty on his journey up a mountain, the man who turned me loose in the woods, the reason I would never settle for a boggy piece of land like this. It was then that I realized that he was the reason for my wild wanderings.”

Presented as a memoir, the stories in “Rivers and Ice” were originally individual essays written over the course of 20 years. Through the years accumulating a body of work, Pope has had success publishing her essays in several magazines, including Alaska Magazine, Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Deep Wild, Hippocampus, Ravensperch Literary Review and Writers’ Workshop Review, among others.

While she was taking a workshop at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks writer Frank Soos encouraged Pope to compile her essays and publish them as a book.

“I’d not thought about compiling them,” she said. “I was very focused on making the individual pieces as best as I could get them and sending them out essay by essay for publication. Some were published and others were rejected and I was pretty intimidated by Frank’s suggestion.”

Still, she decided to try.

“After some starts and stops and a lot of rejection, I found a publisher, Michael Charney with Riddle Brook Publishing, who liked my work but didn’t publish essays,” she said. “He encouraged me to turn the essays into a memoir and suggested that I send the collection to friends and ask for feedback on what they saw as the themes I’d written on that could be the theme throughout the memoir. It was kind of a scary process, but I did it. People were happy to provide input and gradually I began to see that I had woven together several themes — stories of five generations of my family, my time in Alaska and the journeys I’d taken in wild places. All the time that I was writing, though I hadn’t recognized it, I was weaving together family and my wilderness travel, writing what I was living.”

Pope and her publisher worked together for a year, morphing her 20-25 essays into the memoir it is today.

“I appreciate the feedback I received through the publishing and editing process,” she said. “It required a lot of rewriting, but I think the work is much better now. I think this memoir truly represents the stories of my life and my family that I have been trying to tell through my writing my entire life.”

Born in Buffalo, New York, Pope’s family moved to Anchorage when she was 5 years old. She has been writing since she was in elementary school. A poem she wrote while in third grade was published in the Anchorage Daily News.

“That poem was about people trying to get along with each other,” Pope said. “People being the other kids in my classroom.”

A few years later she wrote and won an award for a story about her grandfather who only had one arm.

“I entered this story in a contest about people with physical issues,” she said.

The first person in her family to go to college, Pope left home at 18 years old to study journalism and communications at the University of Washington. After college, she traveled for a year and then returned to Anchorage. Unable to find a job with a newspaper, she worked in retail, then for a nonprofit that provided counseling services to community members, which led to a career in counseling.

Through her different career paths, Pope always returned to writing.

While working as a counselor for a program that treated families involved in the treatment of the trauma of sexual abuse, she wrote a story about child sexual abuse, which was published in a now-defunct women’s journal. A piece she wrote about foster care families was published in an Alaska magazine. While working at the University of Alaska Anchorage and doing technical writing, she wrote a human-interest piece about morning radio talk show hosts.

With her debut book now available, Pope is now working on several essays, but is unsure if they will stand alone or be part of a future book. For now, she continues to write every day and submit her work for publication.

“I’ve made a lot of diversions in my life, but writing has been a constant, even if I wasn’t constantly writing or making a living at it,” she said.

On Aug. 22 from 6-7 p.m., Pope will conduct a reading from her book at the Homer Public Library. The Homer Bookstore will be on hand with copies of the book available for purchase.

“My hope is that people might relate to some of my experiences with my family or perhaps have had similar experiences and can understand a bit of my journey,” she said.

“Rivers and Ice: A Woman’s Journey Toward Family and Forgiveness” is available in Homer at the Homer Bookstore and the Homer Library, in Soldotna at River City Books, and in Anchorage at Title Wave Books and the Writer’s Block.

Follow Susan online at susanpope.org and on Facebook and Instagram, Susan Pope.