Reading to Feature Author, Salmon Fisher

Leslie Leyland Fields, an author, editor, speaker and an active participant in her family’s salmon fishing business in Kodiak, Alaska, speaks Tuesday, Oct. 25, at 7 p.m. in Westmont’s Hieronymus Lounge at Kerrwood Hall. The lecture, sponsored by the English Department and Gender Studies Program, is free and open to the public. She will be reading from her most recent essay, “One Skiff, Two Women, Wild Ocean: A Life in Alaska.”

“She embodies a fascinating multitude of roles: a brilliant writer, salmon fisher, mother, active editor and teacher,” says Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, professor of English.

Fields, a mother of six, and her husband, Duncan, live on an uninhabited island, 80 miles from the town of Kodiak. They have fished commercially with extended family on Harvester Island each summer since 1979 in a salmon-fishing operation. During the winter, Leslie teaches in Seattle Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts program.

Fields has written several books, including “The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives,” “Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Oceans They Fish,” “Surprise Child,” “Surviving the Island of Grace” and “The Water Under Fish.” Her essays and poetry have appeared in The Atlantic, Beliefnet, Christian Science Monitor, Christianity Today and the Seattle Review.

Fields graduated from Cedarville University, earned master’s degrees in journalism and English at the University of Oregon and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goddard College.