Authors' Insights: David Vann's 'Caribou Island' - Why Alaska?

Books tell more than the story of their characters; they tell the stories of the place in which they're set.

 

We asked David Vann about Alaska as the setting for Caribou Island and he shared the following excerpts.  Many thanks to David for sharing these insights with us.
 
 

Q&A - originally published on Amazon.com

Q: Set in Alaska, Caribou Island is the story of a marriage’s unraveling and the tragic events it precipitates. How does your setting reflect and shape the novel’s plot and the characters, especially Irene and Gary?
 
 

Vann: I think wilderness has no meaning on its own. It’s a giant mirror. So as I was writing Caribou Island, I kept focusing on Alaska, and as I described the landscape I was indirectly describing and discovering the interior lives of Irene and Gary. The island and lake are constantly shifting in shape and mood, and even the storms that come down off the glacier feel like they belong to Irene. She resents taking care of this man for thirty years and receiving only his vacancy in return, and the desolation of the place increases the pressure on her. There are no distractions, and no escape is possible.
 
 

Q: You were born in Alaska and spent your childhood there. What was that experience like? What are your impressions of this state that has become such a focus of public consciousness?
 
 

Vann: Alaska is magnificent, and the cold rainforest of Ketchikan, where I spent my childhood, is still mythic in my imagination. In that forest, I always felt I was being watched, and we really did have bears and wolves. There was so much undergrowth and deadfall, I’d sometimes fall through the forest floor to a second floor and disappear completely. And the ocean was even more impossible. The first king salmon I caught was taller than I was, and my grandfather caught a 250-lb halibut. I remember watching it slowly rising to the surface, growing until it became bigger than my imagination. I write about Alaska because it’s in that landscape that I can find some sense of self and possibility and freedom.
 
 

Q: Who are the writers you admire?
 
 

Vann: My favorite writers focus on landscape. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. These writers extend literal landscapes into figurative landscapes. In Blood Meridian, for instance, we find mountains “whose true geology was not stone but fear.” We focus on the real mountains and then they slip and shift and describe what we fear and desire and who we imagine ourselves to be. We shape ourselves through place.
 
 

Genesis - originally published on Powells.com in January of 2011)
 
 

Two years ago, in late January 2009, I was walking on Skilak Lake, from the shore toward Caribou Island. It was early afternoon but looked like evening, the sun low. I didn't know how thick the ice was, or how safe to walk upon. The snow in drifts, like dunes of sand. No other human, and no bird or other animal or even wind. Just silence. The air so clear it seemed I should be able to touch things that were far away, the mountains above the lake.
 
 

I kept walking, but I was very afraid of falling through. I had no experience here. I'd visited this lake only in summer, when it was green from glacial silt, sometimes almost milky. I knew that if I fell through, there'd be no one to help and I'd simply freeze. But I wanted to walk out to Caribou Island. It had held a fascination for me for years. I'd begun writing a novel twelve years earlier. It was set here, but I'd never been able to write past the first fifty pages. I couldn’t see the longer arc. I didn’t know whose story it was or where to focus.  And I felt that walking out to the island I might find how to tell the story.
 
 

I saw a long crack in the ice, indicated by the snow that had fallen on it differently.  I knelt and swept away the snow with my glove and saw black.  I’d wanted to see how deep the ice was, how thick, but the lake beneath was so dark the clear ice became essentially opaque. I was peering into nothing. The ice could have been two inches thick or ten feet thick. And something about gazing at the lake up close and not being able to see it or know it suggested something. I could imagine Irene walking out on this lake and trying to find her marriage and peering down and seeing nothing. I understood that it was her story, that I had to focus on her in this landscape, and that the rest of the novel would come from there.
 
 

And so this walk on the frozen lake became Irene's winter vision late in my new novel, Caribou Island, and I wonder whether other books are like that, with one scene or moment which was the genesis. The most important quality about this moment is its certainty, a certainty that it will not mislead. As I wrote Caribou Island, working on it every morning, I kept returning to describing the place, and the characters and story came from the landscape and the transformations of the landscape. At one point, Irene is running in the forest on Caribou Island and feels the earth tilting beneath her and knows the entire island is rolling over, top-heavy, and this is Irene being written in place, this is discovery of Irene in the landscape, and this is why I write.
 
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If you'd like to browse other books set in or about Alaska our recommendations are here.