alpha seminar home
Ordinary Wolves
This year, Carroll's freshman class will all read Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner (2004), a novel about a boy's coming of age in rural Alaska. As the protagonist grows up, he searches to find his place within the wild ecosystem, amongst the native Inupiaq (as a white kid, he feels shunned by them), and in the urban environment of Anchorage. The Alpha faculty chose this book because it is a moving and well-crafted story about the search for identity. It will give us a lot to talk about that relates to our common Alpha Seminar theme, "Individual and Community."
Seth Kantner at Carroll on August 26
Seth Kantner will be on campus Tuesday, August 26, to talk with us about his novel and his experiences in Alaska. His presentation will begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Carroll PE Center. Be sure to put that on your calendar; attendance is required for all Alpha Seminar students. And you won't want to miss it!
Book Synopsis from Publisher's Weekly:
This riveting first novel offers a profound and beautiful account of a boy's attempt to reconcile his Alaskan wilderness experience with modern society.
Abe Hawcly came to Alaska in search of his bush-pilot father, became enraptured with the wilderness, then moved there with his wife to live in a sod igloo and subsist on his hunting skills while he pursued his painting.
Soon disenchanted with isolation and hardship, his wife abandoned him, leaving him to rear and educate their three children. Abe's youngest child, known by his Iñupiaq name, Cutuk, grows to manhood and learns to hunt, gaining an intimate knowledge of the frozen tundra. Eventually, Cutuk's brother, Jerry, escapes to Fairbanks, and his sister, Iris, attends college and becomes a teacher. Meanwhile, torn between two cultures, Cutuk chafes under discrimination as a white in the midst of Native Americans; he is deprived of both rights and respect by the locals. He also develops a profound curiosity about the city, but once he makes it to Anchorage, he is bewildered and confused by urban slang and modern mores. His attempts to reconcile himself to his own race fail dismally as he is drawn back to the north and the values inherent in the wilderness ("I shook my head, trying to align the years, the Taco Bells, exit ramps, rabid foxes, and this old pot"). . . .this is a tenderly and often beautifully written first novel. As a revelation of the devastation modern America brings to a natural lifestyle, it's a tour de force and may be the best treatment of the Northwest and its people since Jack London's works.
Additional Links
Seth Kanter's Photography Website
http://www.kapvikphotography.com/
Seth Kanter's Changing Alaska: "Dispatches from the Edge"
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/dispatches/
Additional Links
Ordinary Wolves Questions
There are questions we would like you to consider after reading Ordinary Wolves.
Download the questions in:
Buy Ordinary Wolves Online
You can purchase Ordinary Wolves from several online retailers:
Author Biography from Bookbrowse.com
Seth Kantner - trapper, fisherman, photographer, igloo-builder, and acclaimed author of Ordinary Wolves lives in an America most Americans have never seen. Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Alaskan tundra and raised simply on the landwearing mukluks before they were fashionable, eating boiled caribou pelvis, and communing with the Iñupiaq, the native Eskimos of the region. With a photographer's eye and a writer's heart, Seth Kantner reveals an America unknown to many of us.
Kantner's acclaimed novel, Ordinary Wolves, draws on his own boyhood and young adulthood. The story wraps readers up in the Alaskan wilderness and draws them into the hopes and fears of Cutuk, the boy at the center. Much like Cutuk, Seth Kantner was raised and home-schooled in a sod igloo in northern Alaska. He left the igloo for the city and attended the University of Alaska and the University of Montana, where he received a bachelor's degree in journalism.
When he was a boy, Kantner's parents gave him a camera and taught him the basics of photography. He's been documenting his surroundings ever since. He says, "As a family we took about one roll of slide film per year (more would be a waste!)". Since then, Kantner's photographs have appeared in several publications including Alaska Geographic. In 2003, Kantner's photo, "Wolf Tracks", graced the cover of the TelAlaska phone book.
Seth Kantner's writings and photographs have appeared in Outside, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, Switch!, Reader's Digest, among other anthologies and publications. His work reflects his devotion to the land and the animals who live on it, and his belief in the importance of wildness left wild. He lives with his wife and daughter in northwest Alaska. Ordinary Wolves is his first novel.