First-Year Reading Experience – 2006
Author Seth Kantner
Seth Kantner—trapper, fisherman, photographer, igloo-builder, and acclaimed author of Ordinary Wolves—lives in an America most Americans have never seen. Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Alaskan tundra and raised simply on the land—wearing mukluks before they were fashionable, eating boiled caribou pelvis, and communing with Inupiaq, the native Eskimos of the region.
Kantner's novel, Ordinary Wolves, draws on his own boyhood and young adulthood. The story wraps readers up in the Alaskan wilderness and draws them into the hopes and fears of Cutuk, the boy at the center. Much like Cutuk, Seth Kantner was home-schooled in northern Alaska. He attended the University of Alaska and the University of Montana, where he received a bachelor's degree in journalism.
"Seth Kantner started his first dog team when he was nine, and grew up with a Brooks Range valley for a back yard. He and Kole [his brother] did their formal schooling by correspondence, but picked up graduate degrees from Arctic University in wolverine trapping, kayak building and stalking geese, becoming competent and self-sufficient out in the country in a way most so-called outdoorsmen (myself included) could scarcely imagine. They made it all look so easy." —Nick Jans, ALASKA
When he was a boy, Kantner's parents gave him a camera and taught him the basics of photography. He's been documenting his surroundings ever since. He says, "As a family, we took one roll of slide film per year (more would have been a waste!)" Since then, Kantner's photographs have appeared in several publications, including Alaska Geographic. Kanter's writings and photographs have appeared in Outside, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, Switch!, Reader's Digest, among other anthologies and publications. His work reflects his devotion to the land and the animals that live on it, and his belief in the importance of wilderness left wild. He currently lives in northwest Alaska. Ordinary Wolves is his first novel.
"It was more than the story of his life, strained through the funnel of fiction. It was the story of modern bush Alaska, caught in the sort of detail that comes only from long knowing. . . . Ordinary Wolves—the first contemporary Alaska novel that seems true to me, the first one that matters." —Nick Jans, ALASKA
Biography © 2005 Milkweed Editions
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Last updated: 30 May 2006