From ‘Slowdotna’ to authordom

Alaska is a great place — if you choose to live here. If you were born into it, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

Born and raised in Soldotna, Meagan MacVie experienced that ambivalence as decidedly as anybody, and it tinges through the 300 pages of her maiden novel, ‘Ocean in My Ears.’

Very much a coming-of-age book from the point-of-view of an irascible 15-year-old girl, MacVie concedes the plot is very much similar to her life growing up in Soldotna — or as she and her friends used to called it: ‘Slowdotna’ —... very similar to her own upbringing, but not to be taken as any sort of journal.

“No, I would not call it a memoir at all. I definitely was revisiting a lot of things, though,” MacVie said. “I have a daughter who’s 15 now, so it’s kind of an interesting time where my daughter is coming-of-age right in front of me. I feel like 15 years old is a really interesting area, a really exciting process where you learn about cultural differences. Especially growing up in a rural place like Soldotna, you find yourself wanting to do more in the world, feeling like you’re so far away from the world but you have no idea how to participate in that world… It’s largely a rural/urban divide.”

The young MacVie, a child of workers in the Soldotna hospital, spent much of her childhood lost in books and craved to see the larger world. Education was her way out, and MacVie studied at the University of Idaho and Pacific Lutheran University where she earned her MFA in fiction.

She now lives in the Seattle area with her husband and daughter. She published her novel working with Hooligan Press based out of Portland State University.

“I needed to get out of it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love Alaska. To find my own self, I needed to leave,” MacVie said. “I did not want to be critical (about Alaska) at all. I love my home, love my family — my parents still live there. I love the place… that is who I am; I would never want to denigrate it, but at the same time, I did want to interrogate my own experience and try to better understand that we have some of the divides that exist in this country. For me, it was an exploration.”

That said, there were aspects to Alaska she could do without completely.

“A good example was I was up near Denali, and we pulled up near a bridge, this deep ravine taking pictures — it’s just me and my daughter and my mom, and the first thing is see is this older guy dressed in camo with a gun, and whatever, that’s fine, but he keeps eying us and we were like, ‘What’s the deal?’” MacVie recalled. “We get close and he says, ‘Hey Ladies, want some dinner?’ and he pulls out some bird he just killed. He was trying to make some kind of impression, I guess. And I was like, ‘Dude, I know what a spruce hen is, I’ve been hunting — I’m not a stranger to any of it.’ I was frustrated and I told him, ‘I’m from Soldotna — at that point I wasn’t going to tell him I live in Washington.’”

The crafting of the novel came as part of a writers’ consortium at Portland State. The blending of experiences and ideas proved invaluable to MacVie in the construct of her final product.

“There was kind of a mix of people who identified with the book — some who had come from more urban areas, and then there were people who came from more urban areas on the team, so it was interesting to have their perspective. One of the things that happens in the book is very much a side note, the main character has a cat that shows up at the family house, pregnant and so they try to give the (kittens) away at the mall and the parents tell her they need to give the cats away or they’ll freeze out in the barn in the winter. They were feral, so a couple weren’t able to be given away. It’s fall and the dad takes them out and shoots the cats that can’t be given away. People (in the writers’ group) were like, ‘Why have that in there? Why, it’s so upsetting? Well, it’s a real thing. This is part of life, especially if you’re living in an area where it’s best by these animals. You don’t want to see the animals suffer.”

But, trying to respect a broad spectrum of viewpoints, MacVie left the gory details of the experience out of her manuscript.

“It wasn’t like there was a no-kill shelter down the road,” MacVie said. “It’s about how you look at the world, how you see your place in the world and how you manage those issues. I don’t think I landed right or wrong — I see different circumstances.”

MacVie celebrated her book’s launch party Nov. 5 in Portland, two days before its official release. Her Alaska tour kicks off Friday with back-to-back events in Palmer with a free in-store book-signing at 4 p.m. at Fireside Books followed by an author dinner at 6:45 p.m. at Turkey Red Restaurant.

Friday, December 15, 2017 | Palmer

4 PM: Fireside Books; in-store book signing; FREE

6:45 PM: Turkey Red Restaurant; author dinner; $30 per ticket

Saturday, December 16, 2017 | Anchorage

3-5 PM: Alaska Humanities Forum; workshop: “I’m Just Being Myselfie: How Young Narrators Come Alive on the Page (Without Coming Off Like Posers)”; $45-55 per ticket

7 PM: Indigo Tea Lounge; reading, author craft talk, Q&A, and book signing; FREE

Sunday, December 17, 2017 | Cooper Landing

2 PM: Cooper Landing Community Library; reading, Q&A, and book signing; FREE

Sunday, December 17, 2017 | Seward

Time TBA: Resurrect Art Coffee House; reading, Q&A, and book signing; FREE

Friday, December 22, 2017 | Soldotna

4:30 PM: Soldotna Public Library; reading, Q&A, and book signing; FREE