Mary Odden: Storytelling Animal
Mary Odden in a berry patch. Photo by Jennie K.
By Michelle McAfee
Mary Odden is a storytelling animal. For the author of three published books, with another on the way, life has a balance. Odden and her husband Jim live off the Glenn Highway, where Odden says, "a lot of homesteadery-type things happen - taking care of wood, water, heat, dogs, and food. I don't get any writing done in the summertime. The end of January through April is prime time for writing around here."
Odden went to graduate school for creative writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the mid-‘90s. Her MFA thesis, which took 20 years of essays about life in the North, became Mostly Water: Reflections Rural and North. The book connects her experiences living in eastern Oregon with her life in Alaska and vividly details charismatic characters in colorful rural places.
"Even when I was young, I wanted to live in rural places. I liked being in the country, being in nature - how you can be fed and inspired. Human life, we're just small. We're just part of this. There are assumptions when someone is a rural person of who they are and who they've been. Yet, out here, people have vastly different backgrounds. Living in a small community, where you have to depend on people who aren't like you, hopefully, teaches some grace," said Odden
Mary and Jim Odden came to Alaska in their twenties. Odden's voice took on a glow when she described how Alaska has been an incredible, generous place to them. She wanted to make the people, the places, and that generosity and reciprocity as visible as she could in her writing.
They lived on the Kobuk River during their first seasons in Alaska in the '70s and early '80s. Both Mary and Jim spent summers fighting wildfires. In the 90s, they split their time between their homestead on the Glenn Highway and McGrath, where their daughter Kari was born and went to school until they returned to Glennallen so Kari could attend high school.
Mary and Jim ran the Copper River Record (CRR) from 2005 to 2010 when they handed it off to Matt Lorenz, "and of course, Matt handed it off to John Tierney a couple of years ago, and he's done such a great job. When I had the paper, I amused myself by writing a column about life, unintentionally funny politicians, and everything Copper Basin-like. After we quit the paper, I put those columns into a book called Who's Driving: Windshield Time with a Small Alaska Newspaper," Odden said.
Before the Oddens, Linda and Jeremy Weld produced the Copper River Country Journal in the ‘90s. Before that, Sam Lightwood produced Copper Valley Views with a mimeograph machine.
"When the Welds popped up with their paper, Lightwood stopped because he just wanted the valley to have a paper. He didn't care who did it. When the Welds stopped printing in the early 2000s, Sam started up his Copper Valley Views again, and by then, he was almost 80 years old. His wife Marian said, 'Sam, you're either going to get rid of the paper, or you're going to get rid of the cows.' And he didn't want to get rid of the cows.
We always admired that he wanted to do all these things. He was kind of a Renaissance man, an early Kenny Lake homesteader. Music, dance calling, he did it all, had a big garden, and this paper. So we said, 'Okay, Sam, we'll take the paper for five years, and you concentrate on the cows. Every week, we would stop in with the paper as we distributed it, and I always asked for his advice. It was a nice way to be with those people. We enjoyed all our times around Sam and Marian's kitchen table," said Odden.
Another person who helped Mary and Jim in those early days of CRR was Pat Lynn of Valdez, who started the Valdez Star. He was a newspaperman from the Civil Rights era in the south, a courageous journalist who changed some newspapers to be more inclusive.
The Oddens also received help and input from Jean Huddleston, owner and matriarch of the Copper Center Lodge. Huddleston was a good editor and loved to tell stories. She wrote stories about the lodge that corresponded to room numbers, and Odden helped her compile them in a book that has yet to be published.
Odden's third published book, Upcountry Cranberry, was released in 2023. It is as much an ode to the lingonberry as a colorful cookbook full of berry recipes from her family, friends, and neighbors. It was designed by her daughter Kari and features photos taken on berry-picking trips.
"When we were up on the Kobuk, we got to go berry picking with people who lived there. We found these berries everywhere in Alaska, especially in the interior. We got to treat the berry kind of like a special person in this book," said Odden.
Odden and Kari worked on another book project together, written by Tiny Demientieff and released in 2023 by Cirque Press in Anchorage, titled Tiny's Stories: An Athabascan Family on the Yukon River.
Odden gets a lot accomplished for an author who mostly only writes between January and April. She is working on a new novel titled Skywheels: A Town Told In Light, which takes place over a summer and captures how light and life change through the season. There is ice, light, fire, rain, and ice again in this hybrid novel containing fiction and nonfiction elements. The book takes place in western Alaska, which Odden says has a fascinating history: how the population mixed and made economies on the rivers.
One of the main characters is a nun who doesn't want to be a nun anymore. The reader learns about the town through the nun and other characters’ eyes and experiences. Odden said everything that happens in the book comes out of the characters.
"I wanted the fires to happen. I wanted the danger of the small airplanes to happen. I wanted a flood to happen. It's not uncommon for all these things to happen in a little town. People accrete in a place where they can have services and build their cabins. It's how far up the river a barge can go in a year, where enough water can plant and grow a town. I wanted people to see how a town can rise and hang onto its town-ness through the changes of the 21st Century."
Odden believes that humans are storytelling animals, and it's what we are meant to do. We are witnesses. Whether we are scientists, writers, or fishermen, we tell each other stories.
"Everyone, every person has value and stories. There is no story that is unimportant. If you're willing to share your stories and make yourself visible, then there is someplace between us where we can get to know each other. Maybe you have to believe that people should know each other."
Odden said she would like to teach and write more on writing. Her passion for storytelling rings clear, and she is a champion of getting other people's books and stories published and into readers' hands and hearts. For many people, writing a book is a daunting prospect. But Odden tossed off that notion and said, "It's like going into the garden. You don't worry about what you're going to get done. You just go into the garden."
You can find all of Mary Odden's published books and books by others who she helped publish at www.maryodden.com.