“Another North: Essays in Praise of the World That Is”
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By Jennifer Brice; Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2024; 240 pages; $17.95.
It used to be said that “essays don’t sell, nobody wants to read them.” That was never really true, and, in the hands of a gifted writer like Jennifer Brice, we can delight in the form defined by essayist and teacher Phillip Lopate as “a record of a mind tracking its thoughts.”
“The great promise of essays,” Lopate wrote, “is the freedom they offer to explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty; to evade dogmatism and embrace ambivalence and contradiction; to engage in intimate conversation with one’s reader and literary forbears; and to uncover some unexpected truth, preferably via a sparkling prose style.”
Brice, the author of two previous books — ”The Last Settlers,” a work of documentary journalism, and “Unlearning to Fly,” a memoir — has compiled a dozen exemplary essays written over the course of 25 years. They are both intimate and intelligent, and they shine in their use of creative forms and their “sparkling” language.
Born and raised in Fairbanks, Brice has taught English and Creative Writing at East Coast colleges (presently Colgate University) for many years. Now at the start of her sixth decade, with three grown daughters, she’s been willing to look back at her family and personal history, her relationships to others, the person she was and is still becoming, and her influences. Readers will very much feel in conversation with a sharp and inquisitive mind, and Alaska readers may especially find resonance with their own lives.
The first essay, “Another North,” opens as a sleep-deprived “gray-haired professor of English” lands at the Fairbanks airport on winter solstice. The wobbliness she feels about a change in runway signs sets her up for a series of short segments that gather a story that “could begin anywhere” but does begin in 1961, when “the woman who will become our protagonist’s mother,” a newly minted nurse, leaves New York City and drives to Fairbanks for her first job. Then, in 1962, “Carol Ann’s husband of just a few months” is taking off from the Fairbanks airport on his first solo flight. 1964, Carol Ann parks the pram with baby Jennifer outside the Second Avenue Co-op and tells the family husky to “mind the baby” while she shops. Then 1967 and the Fairbanks flood, the start of pipeline construction, a prom, a crush, homesick years at an east coast women’s college, learning to fly “in order to prove something to myself, although it’s not yet clear just what that might be.” In just 12 pages, with specific details, digressions through time and place, and reflections on identity, direction, and love, Brice introduces her mode of thinking about the large and small things that influence a life and leads readers into the expanses of her mind.
The second essay, “Playing Bridge with Robots,” continues with a similarly segmented form and inquiry. Here, Brice toggles between her obsession with the game of bridge — especially playing it on-line with computer-generated partners — and her long friendship with another writer (one who will be recognized by Alaska readers.) At first the back-and-forth play might seem odd, but connections gradually emerge as the friendship slows and founders. “We weren’t doing what I am doing right this minute, which is trying to capture some fugitive truth about her. Or about me and her. Or maybe just about me.”
The remaining essays continue the pattern of employing unusual structures to contain fragments of memory, thought, and reconciliation, along with references to literary works and cultural phenomena. “On Keeping House,” is formatted around a series of possible guides to, literally, homemaking but more expansively to living as a woman.
“Occasional Lapses into Indulgence” examines the author’s complicated relationship with her “fabulist” grandmother and includes excerpts from letters between the two and her grandmother’s correspondence with the writer James Michener and various political figures. (Grandmother Brice felt free to advise them on their clothing.)
“I Am the Space Where I Am” discusses Brice’s move to upstate New York (where a neighbor instructed her on just what she needed to do with her house and yard to fit in) and how she squared her love for her Fairbanks home with her adopted one. “After Alaska,” she writes, “being in New York is a little bit like being on Prozac: the highs are not as high, the lows not as low.”
One of the longest, most creative, and most personally revealing essays, “My Essay on Flowers and How Things End” takes the form of an abecedarian, in which each of the 26 sections begins with a letter of the alphabet, in this case naming a flower. A is for Astroemeria (a showy lily), B for bittersweet, and so on. While each section references a flower, the passages are not about the flowers per se but associated with the author’s life, in particular her relationships with men. Time here is fluid, flowing back and forth across decades to tie together a bouquet of self-discoveries.
Because Brice’s essays were written at different times, with different purposes, and are meant to stand alone, some facts and even scenes reappear throughout the book. In another writer’s hands, these could be repetitive and annoying, but the different contexts in which they’re presented multiply their effect. The family origin myth, central to the entire book, returns with increasing meaning, and only at the end does Brice uncover an astonishing truth about it.
Poignant, funny, introspective, sparkling in its language, “Another North” deserves a place, not just on a shelf of essays, but among the books we turn to for appreciating the gifts and burdens of our lives.