The other Ivie

PALMER —Alaska breeds a high number successful, published authors — so many that the small town of Palmer boasts two with the same last name, or at least same phonetically.

“Alaska appeals to writers,” said Jackie Ivie on Saturday at Fireside Books, where she signed copies of her new paranormal romance novel “Penetrate”. “Writers are loners and when it’s dark outside, and there’s not a lot to do outside, it matches the writer psyche — it really does. In the summer, I don’t write as well. You have that outside interference of the sun and fun, but in the winter you can just whip ‘em out.”

Few can whip ‘em out like Ivie.

She’s published more than 60 novels — all of them romances applying one fantastical conceit or another, and all of them penned after she moved to Palmer in 2000 to be a manager at the local post office. She began writing in 1983, but it wasn’t until she moved to Alaska from Wyoming that she found commercial and critical success, taking home her 39th International Digital Award two weeks ago.

“I started with historicals, then moved into vampires… now I’ve branched into time travel, which meshes the historical with contemporary,” she said. “It’s the most fun you can have. Take some guy back 200 years and stick him in a kilt.”

In Halloween spirit, Ivie was in full vampire regalia Saturday at the store where she held her first book signing 12 years earlier. Today, she has her own section on the shelves, right around the corner from her photo taken with none other than the sultan of romance himself — Fabio.

When in character as Jackie Ivie, she stands 6-foot-4, putting her eye-to-eye with Fabio, who is the credited author on three romance novels of his own, though Ivie suspects they may have been ghost-written.

Fellow Palmerite Eowyn Ivey — who now lives in Chickaloon — also has her own section at Fireside Books, where she was employed in the early days of Jackie Ivie’s success. And while Ivey may be Alaska’s most respected author, as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for 2012’s “The Snow Child” and getting as much acclaim for her latest, “To the Bright Edge of the World”, she’s got a long way to go to catch Ivie’s prolific body of work.

“Eowyn is an amazing writer and I am more than thrilled to have (the same name) as her’s,” Ivie said. “She can’t believe how many books I write, but to me, it’s just a compulsion. If I’m not writing, I’d be stitching.”

Ivie is the author’s maiden name. Her married name is Jackie Goforth, the same as the best in show winner of the stitchery competition at this year’s Alaska State Fair. This talent came ostensibly from doing research on what will be the third and final book in the Portals of Time series, called “Annihlate”, which transports a modern young heroine to the days of the Vikings and, of course, their sinewy, shirtless men.

“I was stitching while watching DVDs about the Vikings, so when I write my Viking, he’ll act like he’s supposed to,” Ivie said. “To me, my characters are absolutely real. I disappear into the character itself… When I first started writing I wanted it to be where you could smell the fire, feel the heat — that’s why I write.”

Her favorite fans are those who escape in reading her work, the same way she escapes in writing it.

“It’s like Hawthorne said, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,’” Ivie said. “I have a friend who was going through chemo a second time, and her family was there to help her only a little, but she said, Jackie Ivie was there for her. She said, ‘You helped me escape that.’ That’s who I’m writing for.”

Not all of her fans are quite so harmless, which is why Jackie Ivie’s official address is in Anchorage.

“I have fans who say they’re vampires,” she said. “And with Google Earth and everything, I don’t really want them to know where I live. So Jackie Ivie has a P.O. box in Anchorage.”