Leslie Leyland Fields — Reading 1 comments

When you read Leslie Leyland Fields' creative nonfiction or poetry, the experience is not unlike being in a skiff: you lean in to the language, landing metaphors that have the same freshness and invigorating shock of the big fish in cold water.

Leslie Leyland Fields lives in Kodiak Alaska, overlooking the waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Winters she lives in the town of Kodiak where she writes, teaches and runs an editing business, The Northern Pen. Summers she and her husband pack up their house and six children, and move out to a remote wilderness island, population eight, to work in their family-owned commercial salmon fishing operation. Leslie holds a B.A. from Cedarville University, and three graduate degrees from the University of Oregon, and Goddard College. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, Image, Best Essays NW, On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, and many others. She received the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. When not writing, fishing, mothering, or teaching in Seattle Pacific University's MFA program, she travels widely, speaking at colleges and conferences on matters of faith, literature, and wilderness.

These poems were recorded at the 2008 Glen Workshop.

Bibliography

• "Parenting is Your Highest Calling" and 8 Other Myths That Trap Us in Worry and Guilt (WaterBrook Press, 2008), nonfiction
• Surviving the Island of Grace: Life on the Wild Edge of America (Epicenter Press 2008), nonfiction
• Surprise Child (WaterBrook Press, 2006), nonfiction
• Out On The Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Oceans They Fish (Thomas Dunne Books, 2001), nonfiction
• The Entangling Net: Alaska's Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (University of Illinois Press, 1996), nonfiction
• The Water Under Fish (Trout Creek Press, 1994), poetry