Corinna Cook is the author of Leavetakings (University of Alaska Press, 2020). She is a former Fulbright Fellow, an Alaska Literary Award recipient, and a Rasmuson Foundation awardee. Corinna holds degrees from Pomona College and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and she earned a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. Corinna’s current book project explores Alaska-Yukon art, ecology, and history. More at corinnacook.com.
1. What writer do you want to be when you grow up?
Eva Saulitis and Sarah de Leeuw. Poet essayists. Of Alaska and northern British Columbia. Super involved in form, structure, language, philosophy, and spirit. Eva Saulitis was a marine biologist. And Sarah de Leeuw works in medicine and human geography. I want to grow up to be Eva and Sarah because they are devoted to northern places and people—past, present, and future—and to poetry, and to academic, intellectual existence, and to social responsibility. It all goes into their essays. And it makes their essays really, really good.
2. What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written?
Maybe my essay “Fluid Places.” It looks at swans and squid and creation and transformation and loss, the latter three of which I’m still working on, so this essay is like a friend; we keep revisiting the same things together and they keep surprising us.
3. Who do you trust with your drafts and why?
I don’t feel very protective of my drafts but I get momentum from poets. Poets just tend to read drafts in a way that raises the bar, which is useful, and they seem checked out about issues like “what happens next” but at the same time they also seem hyper checked in because they’re really good at reading all the words. They’ve got this decidedly experiential, no-nonsense way of engaging every single image and every single metaphor and every single maybe-metaphor, and then they tell me with disconcerting precision what my draft is actually saying, and frankly that’s very exciting. Leanna Petronella’s reading, for example, is a creature unto itself; I am proud to consider it indispensable.
4. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Daryl Farmer told me an essay I was working on had served my thinking and that it was time to shift the relationship: time for me to serve the essay. That idea, that the relationship can and in fact must change, is the most eye-opening idea about process I’ve ever encountered.
5. What’s your go to recommendation to read when somebody says “I’m not sure about this whole nonfiction thing?” Why? What do you hope it shows them? What about it excites you?
As a very poor literary evangelist, I’m inclined to leave nonfiction skeptics in peace and talk instead about the weather, a subject I genuinely enjoy. But if somebody says, “I officially want a taste of this essay thing,” I might hand them Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. The essayettes are bite-sized, and I see that as inviting. In the same vein, the sentences are gorgeous and the voice is playful. In fact I might say an elaborate aesthetic of warmth and openness and welcoming drives the collection. But—and this is far more important—the collection is not so language-driven nor so playful as to obscure its human urgency. The Book of Delights is quite direct in the simple fact of its social+philosophic rigor, and in the end, that is exactly what I would hope for a newcomer to immerse in.
Keep Reading
Corinna Cook, “Documentation and Myth: On Daniel Janke’s How People Got Fire,” Assay 4.2
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 