Cairn gathers poetry and prose written over the course of 40 years by a former Writer Laureate of Alaska. “Taken together, the poems in this volume form a kind of verse cairn,” writes Kevin Clark in his introduction, which praises Ms. Shumaker for her hyper-attunement to the natural world and for writing unabashedly “against a tradition of austere male expression.”
Ms. Shumaker is the daughter of two deserts—the Sonoran desert where she grew up and the subarctic desert of interior Alaska where she lives now. Cairn is her 11th book. A professor emerita of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.
Ms. Shumaker’s reckoning with the decline then death of her close friend and former student Eva Saulitis, in a section titled “Impossible Grace,” will break your heart — it’s true — and it will remind you that you have one.
“We hope that someone will recognize that … these stacks of stones commemorate and leave messages, but we don’t know. We can’t ever know,” says Peggy Shumaker on the Living Writers podcast. Listen to the whole three-question interview here.