Last frontier is her first choice
Melinda Moustakis returns to the wilds of Alaska with ‘Homestead’
Melinda Moustakis, author of the new novel “Homestead,” knows about homes — she’s had many of them just in the past decade.
“I think in the last 10 years, I’ve lived in eight different states. I lose count,” the author says with a laugh via telephone from Denver, which she’s called home for the past two years.
There have been stints in Michigan, Texas and other places across the country. But there’s one state that she keeps going back to, both physically and emotionally: Alaska, the home of her birthplace of Fairbanks, and the setting for “Homestead,” which will be published by Flatiron Books on Tuesday.
Moustakis’ novel follows Marie and Lawrence, who meet at an Anchorage lodge in 1956 and get married soon — very soon — afterward. Lawrence, a quiet Korean War veteran, has moved to the territory to claim 150 acres of land that he’s determined to clear and build a cabin upon. Marie has come from Conroe, Texas, to visit her sister and brother-in-law, and falls in love with Lawrence instantly, agreeing to live with him in an old school bus while he prepares the land for their eventual home.
Moustakis spent her childhood in Bakersfield, but her birthplace of Alaska was always on her mind.
“I spent a lot of summers there,” she recalls. “My mom comes from a family of nine kids, and most of them are up there. I think
my family would say I’m an honorary Alaskan.”
Moustakis’ mother also played a role in her deciding to become a writer, encouraging her interest in poetry when she was a child.
“I wrote poems that scared my mother,” she says. “I think she still has some of them. They’re very dark. Thankfully, she didn’t say, ‘What is this? Why are you writing about these scary things?’ She just was like ‘Oh, OK. That’s interesting.’ ”
Moustakis went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she took poetry classes. One of her professors advised her to try her hand at fiction, noting that her poems tended to have a narrative structure. Another teacher turned her on to the fiction of Pam Houston, whose short story “Dall” is about hunting
sheep in Alaska. Moustakis decided to attend graduate school at UC Davis to study with Houston.
“I was wondering if I would write about California or Alaska, and Alaska sort of took over,” Moustakis says. “At the time, I was going up in the summers to fish with one of my uncles on an island in the Kenai River. Listening to my Uncle Sonny taught me how to write dialogue and be really invested in people as characters. My writing had been more focused on the landscape and imagery, and I could do that well, but having Sonny’s voice definitely strengthened my writing.”
Her visits to Alaska helped inspire her first book, “Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories,” published in 2011 by the University of Georgia Press.
“There’s a lot of fishing
in that book,” Moustakis says. “I was writing a lot about being on the river, and it’s also about three generations of a homesteading family. With wilderness literature, there’s often just a lone man wandering the wilderness, so my first book also includes children’s perspectives and women’s perspectives.”
The book received positive reviews from critics and led to Moustakis being selected as a “5 Under 35” honoree by the National Book Foundation. The prestigious program recognizes promising debut authors; past awardees have included recognizable names like ZZ Packer, Karen Russell and Danielle Evans.
Moustakis wasn’t done with Alaska, though. She decided to make the state the setting for “Homestead,” which was inspired
by her mother’s parents, who homesteaded in the territory in the late 1950s, and like Marie and Lawrence, lived in an old school bus, which Moustakis got to see on a visit. Also like the couple, her grandparents’ courtship was a quick one.
“My grandmother grew up in Texas, and she went up to Alaska to visit her sister who had moved there with her husband,” Moustakis says. “She met my grandfather, and within a week they were engaged, and within six weeks they were married. So this idea of strangers getting married was the impetus for the novel.”
Her grandmother also provided the first sentence of the book: “God made the trees and men made the kindling, they say.”
“That’s based on something my grandmother said when she was showing me the home,” Moustakis recalls. “That was many years ago, and the line stuck with me, and I was like, I think that’s the beginning of something.”
The beginning, though, was the easy part. Moustakis started writing the book in 2014 and had her share of doubts and roadblocks along the way. One challenge came with the character of Lawrence, who is extremely laconic, which meant he wouldn’t be given much dialogue in the novel.
“I spent a year just adding interiority, which was such an important layer, because we have to know what these characters are thinking because they don’t talk as much as you would think,” she says.
“So every chapter was like, what can happen that will reveal something interesting about these characters that you didn’t know before? What’s happening in the stars? What’s happening with the weather, what’s happening with the animals? What’s happening between them?”
Moustakis will have a chance to visit the land that her characters inhabit soon — her book tour will take her to Juneau and Anchorage in March.
It will be another opportunity to see the state that she holds dear to her heart — and that she hopes to introduce to readers across the world.
“I want to write against this mythology of Alaska as the last frontier,” she says. “Alaska Natives have been there for thousands of years, and people have always lived there. There’s this idea that it’s an untouched, pristine wilderness, and that’s not true. There’s a price to be paid in trying to forge a life in a place that’s beautiful but also tough to live in. I just want to be true to the Alaska that I’ve experienced and that I know my family has experienced.”