Chatter Marks

Karen Foster is the mother of Bonnie Craig, an 18-year-old University of Alaska Anchorage student who was sexually assaulted and murdered in September 1994. Bonnie’s body was discovered near McHugh Creek, south of Anchorage, and for more than twelve years her murder remained unsolved—it took almost 17 years before it made it to court. During that time, Karen became a relentless advocate for her da...

The Alaska Highway—better known as the AlCan—was built during World War II as a strategic military supply route connecting the continental United States to Alaska. Construction began on March 9, 1942, just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor heightened fears of Japanese expansion in the North Pacific. Those fears became very real that June, when Japanese aircraft bombed Dutch Harbor and,...

Kyle Worl is an Alaska Native athlete, coach, and cultural advocate who has spent most of his life competing in, and helping pass on, Arctic Sports and Traditional Games. He’s earned more than 100 medals, been named an Outstanding Athlete multiple times at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, and competed in Traditional Games throughout the circumpolar North. He’s even competed on American Ninja Warr...

For nearly 30 years, Doug Vandegraft has been writing about bars in Alaska. In his book, “A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska,” he uses the state’s longtime watering holes as a way into its broader social history. Doug spent decades traveling throughout Alaska during his career as a federal cartographer, and along the way he became interested in the bars that seemed to function as more than ju...

Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer, and experimental philosopher, and his work uses imagination to question some of our most basic assumptions about how the world works. His new book, “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” looks beyond human societies for new ways of thinking about politics, drawing lessons from bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and entire ecosystems. At the heart of the...

Joseph Dahmen is an architect and the founder of the Biogenic Architecture Lab at the University of British Columbia. The lab’s lead designer, Isobel McLean, also joins this conversation. She works at the intersection of architecture, microbiology, and biofabrication. And together, Joseph and Isobel are experimenting with mycelium—the vast network of fungal threads that grows through soil, wood, a...

Author Lily Tuzroyluke is from Tikiġaq, also known as Point Hope, a community on Alaska's northwest coast that has been home to generations of people for thousands of years. It’s widely regarded as one of the oldest, continuously lived-in settlements in North America. As a writer, Lily often begins by imagining the land itself—not as it exists today, but as it existed centuries ago—meditating on e...

Corinna Cook is an essayist whose writing follows the stories embedded in the borderlands of Southeast Alaska, northern British Columbia, and the southern Yukon. Drawing from history, natural science, and personal experience, she asks what the landscape can teach us—how it preserves memory, how climate reshapes our understanding of place, and how the painful histories of colonialism continue to sh...

Tom Kortbeek and Roos Meerman are the founders of Fillip Studios, a Netherlands-based interdisciplinary design studio whose work sits at the intersection of art, science, technology, and human experience. Together, Tom and Roos have spent more than a decade exploring what happens when artists, designers, engineers and scientists are invited into the same conversation. Their projects explore everyt...

Anchorage Historian David Reamer has spent years digging through archives, newspapers, and forgotten corners, recovering stories that might otherwise disappear. From his early days of sharing historical stories on social media to his long-running Histories of Alaska column in the Anchorage Daily News, he’s documented everything from vanished neighborhoods and local legends to racial covenants, lab...

Ashley Saupe is the host of the Sharp End Podcast, a show built around firsthand accounts of accidents, near misses, survival, and the complicated psychology of risk in the outdoors. But before she started the podcast, she was studying the mistakes of others, reading Accidents in North American Climbing, an annual publication by the American Alpine Club that documents climbing incidents, what went...

Sue Aikens is the warden of Kavik River Camp, a remote, self-sufficient outpost on Alaska’s North Slope. A collection of bunkhouses, fuel tanks, generators and equipment set against a wide, treeless, and unforgiving landscape defined by wind, cold, and distance. Just open ground, shifting weather, and a constant awareness that survival depends on preparation and respect for the elements. Hunters,...

Caroline Van Hemert is a wildlife biologist, writer, and researcher whose work moves between science, story, and the lived experience of wild places. She’s based in Alaska, where she’s spent years studying migratory birds and the shifting ecosystems they move through, paying close attention to how climate change is reshaping patterns that have existed for generations. She’s also the author of “The...

Don Rearden is an author and an educator whose work is rooted in Alaska—its landscapes, its communities, and the complex realities shaping life across the North. His writing—both fiction and nonfiction—blends elements of survival, culture, and environmental change. Whether he’s exploring a pandemic unfolding in the Arctic or a coastal village on the brink of relocation, his work is grounded in liv...

Sam Davenport writes the AK IRL newsletter. It dissects Alaska reality television as entertainment and as a cultural lens that shapes how Alaska is perceived from the Outside — an idea often signaled right from the start in show titles filled with buzzwords like wild, survival, and frontier. As if there’s a checklist for how Alaska gets branded and sold. She writes about the manufactured drama, th...

Julia O’Malley is a journalist, a cook, a baker, and lately she’s been researching and re-creating Cold War cakes. During the Cold War era—roughly the decades between the end of World War II and the early 1990s—cake mix transformed a food once associated with luxury into something democratic, something anyone could make at home. Julia says that those boxed mixes, and the recipes people built aroun...

Jeremie McGowan is an artist, designer, and researcher. Amund Sjolie Sveen is an artist. And together, they created Real. Arctic., an exhibition that examines how the word “Arctic” is used in branding, institutions, geopolitics, and everyday consumer products — and how the use of that word shapes what we think we know about the arctic. Their work blurs the line between critique and commodity, aski...

Paul Koberstein is a journalist, whose recent book, “Canopy of Titans,” explores one of the most overlooked ecosystems on Earth: the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest. Stretching roughly 2,500 miles from just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the western Gulf of Alaska, it’s the largest temperate rainforest on the planet. Fueled by Pacific storms and cool ocean currents, it support...

Emily Sullivan is a writer, a photographer, and a director whose work is grounded in questions of land, community, and responsibility. Throughout her work, she focuses on uplifting Indigenous perspectives — not by speaking for communities, but by listening to what people are already saying and doing. Her first film, Shaped by Land, is currently screening at festivals. It’s a documentary about Gree...

Kevin Lane is the executive chef and co-owner of The Cookery and The Lone Chicharron Taqueria in Seward, and he was recently named as a James Beard Award semifinalist. Reflecting on that recognition, he says it wouldn’t have been possible without his team at The Cookery, or the kitchens and crews from his past that shaped the way he cooks today. Those roots stretch back to California’s Sacramento...

Peter Dunlap‑Shohl's career traces a remarkable arc, from daily newsroom deadlines to personal, long-form storytelling. For 27 years, he worked for the Anchorage Daily News, drawing editorial and political cartoons. He produced thousands of comics focused on, more often than not, the worst things he could find in Alaska politics and in the pages of the newspaper — the biggest screwup, the clearest...

Charles Stankievech is an artist, a writer, and an academic. He teaches at the University of Toronto, and his art takes him into some of the most remote landscapes on earth. Places like CFS Alert, the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. He describes the Arctic as occupying two parallel spaces in our cultural imagination: one built on myth and fantasy, and another grounded in har...

Kikkan Randall is a five-time Olympian and an icon of U.S. cross-country skiing. But before all the medals and podiums, she was a high schooler with dyed hair, face paint, and a nickname that captured her energy: “Kikkanimal.” Her teammates gave it to her as a nod to the edge, spirit, and unity she brought to the team. Cross-country skiers understand that it’s a sport that rewards time spent—refin...

Alev Kelter is a rugby Olympian. She grew up in Eagle River, Alaska, playing varsity boys' hockey because there wasn’t a girls’ team. That drive to compete at the highest level has carried her through a career that spans multiple sports. She played soccer and hockey at the University of Wisconsin, and was part of U.S. national team programs in both sports—earning spots on the U.S. hockey national...

Ben Weissenbach is an environmental journalist and the author of “North to the Future.” It’s a book about Alaska, but also about uncertainty, responsibility, and the quiet, sometimes uncomfortable process of learning how to see. Ben spent time in the Brooks Range and Fairbanks with Roman Dial, a professor of biology and mathematics; Kenji Yoshikawa, a permafrost scientist; and Matt Nolan, a resear...