In Ingress, a boy named James Clarke wanders somewhere his grandfather forbade him to go, chasing nothing more than a game of hide and seek. What he finds is a village with an old, spired house his people call the Forgotten Place, and a voice that tells him he is not yet a man, and so he will be allowed to leave. His grandfather, a shaman, has to explain to him afterward what he has just brushed against, and why it will never let go of him now that it has noticed him. When I wrote that scene, I could feel the cold coming up off the page. I still can.
I arrived in Alaska at eighteen, almost nineteen. I left at sixty. Whatever I am as a person, and whatever I am as a writer, Alaska built most of it. I did not visit that place. I lived inside its winters, its silence, and its long, strange dark for forty-two years, and it’s just as long summer days. It got into me the way a place only gets into you when you give it that much of your life.
It is a land of beauty and danger unlike anywhere else I have ever known. I have stood in the kind of silence that has weight to it. I have watched light do things over mountains and water that I still cannot fully describe. I have also felt, more than once, that something out there was older and stranger than I had words for. I miss it still. I suspect I always will.
That danger was never just a feeling. While I was settling into Anchorage in 1972, someone warned me not to go walking without a gun because of the moose. I laughed until I understood. A bull moose can stand seven feet at the shoulder and outweigh a small car. It does not bite like a bear. It kicks, front and back, hard enough to break bones, and it does not always warn you before it charges. A female moose protecting her young is even more dangerous than the bull. Anchorage still had real forest and wild edges in those years, the kind of woods you could walk into and simply not come back from. I learned fast that respect for that land was not optional. Grandpa Clark's warning to young James in Ingress is not so different from the one I was given my first week in Alaska: there are things out there older and larger than you, and if you do not yet understand what you are walking into, you had better turn around.
I lived inside Alaska's mystery for forty-two years, and it never let me go.
While I was writing the early Ravens Cove books, I read A Dena'ina Legacy, Peter Kalifornsky's own account of his people's stories and language. I wanted to understand the depth and dignity of what I was living alongside, the way good research always deepens a story instead of just decorating it.
The Forgotten Place, its curse, and the family that guards its story are mine, born out of everything Alaska taught me. The Kumrande are something else again. In Ingress, they are not one monster but a whole class of beings, small and cloven-footed, spoken of the way other cultures speak of fairies or goblins or nymphs. They were creatures old-timers everywhere seem to have a name for. I built mine from the flavor and dread of Dena'ina tradition, braided with folklore I had gathered over a lifetime of reading and listening. They belong to me and to the years that shaped me.
That is what a novelist does with a place she loves. She lets it change her, and then she makes something new out of what is left standing. Forty-two years of my one life went into a land I still dream about, and I will keep writing what it taught me for as long as I have stories left to tell.
Mary Ann Poll is America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers, author of the six-book Ravens Cove Iconoclast series, and host of Real Ghost Chatter. Find her books at maryannpoll.com or wherever good books are sold.