Becoming Earth

(Paperback)

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Description

After beating breast cancer in her late forties, Eva Saulitis again faces the shadow, knowing this time the result will not end well. Saulitis revels in the nostalgia and secret pleasures that come from knowing it's all fleeting. She searches for answers from European poets and Buddhist scholars, from women in treatment chat rooms, from family, from routine; she looks out into the wilderness, at the salmon dying in the river without the ease of morphine, at stone structures broken from water freezing, expanding inside. Becoming Earth is the account of a woman living life in the presence of death, trying to make sense of a world that will keep going, even though she won't.

Author Bio

Essayist, poet, and marine biologist Eva Saulitis for nearly thirty years studied killer whales in Prince William Sound, along with her partner Craig Matkin. Her first book, Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press), considers questions science did not allow her to ask. Her second nonfiction book, Into Great Silence (Beacon), deals with the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the orcas she studied. Her writing has earned awards from the Rasmuson Foundation, the Alaska Humanities Forum, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Eva Saulitis was Associate Professor in the University of Alaska Anchorage Low-Residency MFA program and a faculty member of the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. She passed away on January 16, 2016.