As this blog post goes live, I’m on a cruise ship navigating the waters of the Alaskan coast and enjoying what I’m hoping is a relaxing vacation and not two weeks of seasickness. I’ve never been on a cruise before, so who knows? Given where I’m at, I decided to make this post about Alaska. I’d put up a travel guide, but our Alaskan travel guides are pretty old; the internet exists, is far more up-to-date, and you have access to it if you’re reading this post, so it feels pretty pointless. Although I will have to pay for internet on the cruise, so I suppose there is value in packing a physical travel guide if you’re actually on a trip. They don’t leave much to talk about, though, so that photo on the left acts as a link to the Alaskan travel guides we’ve got.

So, if I’m not going to talk about travel guides, what’s this post about? At the time of writing, I’m still at work and haven’t yet been to Alaska, and I’m still looking forward to some downtime instead of overeating in a floating city. We won’t be doing one of the inland adventure packages that would see us take the train between Alaska and the Yukon (though that’s on my bucket list), but we will be hitting various ports of call with on-shore activities we can try. Assuming nothing has gone catastrophically wrong, I’ll be on the boat headed towards Skagway if you’re reading this the instant it goes up. We’ll have already visited Ketchikan and Juneau, with a single port of call ahead of us in Whittier before the boat turns around and hits the same stops on the way back. I assure you, though, there’s a method to my madness in mentioning all of these stops, and it has to do with the first book I’m recommending in what has become a rather long-winded post: Sister and I in Alaska. This is a reproduction of a journal, written and illustrated by Emily Carr for her sister Alice, of their adventures in Alaska in 1907, a trip that would spur Emily to document totem poles and eventually come into her own style.

I put the book on hold because I honestly didn’t know what to talk about for this post; I don’t know much about Alaska other than that it seems like a fun, beautiful place to visit where we hope to see some aurora, gorgeous scenery, and whales. I am, however, a self-described “weirdo art school kid” with a bachelor of fine arts from OCADU, so I figured seeing some of Emily Carr’s early works could be interesting. The style seen on the cover continues throughout, and her comments accompanying the drawings give context. And I must say, I didn’t realize that Emily Carr was such a funny woman. A favourite entry of mine is early on when she’s writing about time on the boat, the SS Princess Royal (not affiliated with the Princess Cruise lines we know today): “Among the islands there were occasions on which vicious strips of open sea had to be crossed. For these Sister and I were well equipped; and heroically prepared ourselves.” alongside a picture of them in their bunks, sleeping peacefully while clutching bottles clearly marked as Brandy. This humorous tone prevails throughout the journal, and the pair get into some shenanigans, like getting lost on a mountain trail with a guide who seemed only to have eyes for Alice, and Emily dropping her purse into a gap between the window and wall in her hotel room, requiring a carpenter to get it out for her. How much of it is accurate to their trip? Who knows? According to the introduction, she wrote the journal after the fact for her sister, so maybe she jazzed things up a bit in the retelling.

I won’t exactly be following in the Carr sisters’ footsteps, as they visited Alert Bay (actually BC), Skagway, Juneau, and Sitka, the last of which would require our boat to travel over more open ocean than it already will between Skagway and Whittier. I admit I’d like to see Sitka, though, as Emily Carr seemed to enjoy it. It’s a place that comes up a lot in the next book: Proud Raven, Panting Wolf by Emily L. Moore. VPL has this available through our ProQuest Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion eBook database, which merits its own blog post at some point. Proud Raven, Panting Wolf tells the story of Alaska’s Totem Parks, sites of relocated, restored, and rebuilt totem poles made by Hida and Tlingit clans. Full disclosure: I am not a history buff and generally prefer reading fantasy to reality, so when I say this book caught my interest and made me want to keep reading, you should consider it high praise. It weaves a tale of Native American people, The US Forest Service, the Civilian Construction Corps and President Roosevelt’s New Deal at the tail end of the Great Depression. In Sitka, on her 1907 trip, Emily Carr saw a prototype of what this initiative would bring about nearly 40 years later, and I’ll be seeing the results in other towns soon enough.

We’re nearing the end of this post, so I’ll stop with the history lesson and simply note something I found amusing: a surprising number of romance books are set in Alaska. When I mentioned this to a colleague, their reaction was, “Well, they need to stay warm up there.” Given that I’m there in mid-June, and research says to expect between 4 and 20 degrees Celsius, I think my colleague is on to something. Also, I’m highlighting the book on the side there because there’s a dog on the cover. The description doesn’t mention the dog at all, though, so are they just trying to court canine lovers? A critic review gives the dog a name, so at least it gets some page time, I guess.

And that’s it for me this month. If I see any aurora or whales, I’ll update you all next month with a picture and maybe make the post about them somehow.