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A cairn is a gathering of stones that marks where people have traveled. It’s also a place to leave messages, not knowing who might receive them.

Cairn book cover

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.”

Peggy Shumaker headshot

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 .

Peggy Shumaker at vlog

Join us in person or on Thursday, Sept. 26, for Peggy Shumaker’s reading and book-signing. All Living Writers events take place at 4:30 ET in Persson Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Beyond the Book

  • “It’s remarkable Shumaker arrived where she is today, highly educated, widely traveled, and a mentor to others, rather than, say, an exhausted waitress with a nicotine habit,” writes David James in his of Cairn.
  • Read “Exit Glacier,” “Night Dive,” “Spirit of the Bat” and other poems by Peggy Shumaker .
  • In “Wild Darkness,” , Eva Saulitis writes movingly about coming to terms with her own impending death.

 

“Lovely, the sunrise

caught in cholla blossoms, 

the roadrunner’s mad red

eye slash. Gone.”

Peggy Shumaker, "Lives of Shadows, Lingering Scent"