Highlights from Footnotes

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... to the archive of Highlights from our Footnotes newsletter. Our highlights include alumni, current students, and faculty of the Department of English. We also will share exceptional department news in this section. Read the stories that makes our department thrive!

 
 

 

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Alumni Spotlight: Jessica Klagmann (née Bryant)

Jessica Bryant Klagmann. Photo courtesy of Klagmann
Photo courtesy of Klagmann
Jessica Bryant Klagmann

I was introduced to UAF by David Nikki Crouse, who was my first undergraduate writing professor in New Hampshire, and who had graduated from UAF’s creative writing MFA program. I’d never considered going to ĐÓ°Épro, but after losing my father in my last year of college and learning that he’d always wanted to go, it felt like the kind of adventure I needed. I remember David saying to me before I moved to Fairbanks: You’ll live in a dry cabin. You’ll get a truck. You’ll probably get a dog. I did all of these things, much to my delight. They also told me: ĐÓ°Épro is a place that, by nature, forces you to figure something out about yourself. This, I found, was also true.

As a reader, I’ve always leaned toward magical realism, speculative fiction, and environmental nonfiction. Books that shaped me and my work are Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces, Kevin Brockmeier’s Brief History of the Dead, and anything by Anne Valente, Nicole Krauss, and Rick Bass. A favorite recent read was Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.

As a writer, I’m drawn to the ways people connect to wild landscapes and the natural world, and magical realism has been my way of weaving lightness into dark subjects. But I didn’t always do this well. David Nikki Crouse—who returned to teach at UAF—was an incredible mentor, not just in the craft of writing, but also in becoming a teacher. Filmmaker Len Kamerling encouraged me—as I struggled with pacing and action—to visualize the way scenes unfold and fit together as a whole. Derick Burleson pushed me to find grounding in my fantastical ideas, but then we also went off on tangents about the exquisite beauty of flowers. Everyone I knew in ĐÓ°Épro taught me some simple truth about life that carried into who I became as a writer.

 

Left: North of the Sunlit River and This Impossible Brightness, novels by Jessica Bryant Klagmann

During my time at UAF, I wrote a thesis of three novellas, discovered a love for teaching, learned a thing or two about publishing (I was ±Ę±đ°ůłľ˛ą´Ú°ů´Ç˛őłŮ’s editor-in-chief for Volume 32), and met my future husband. After we left ĐÓ°Épro for New Mexico, I worked at a college in Española as a writing instructor and the director of their adult education program. I also co-founded the school’s literary journal, Trickster. All the while, I kept writing stories, kept submitting. In 2013, I got my first publication for a nonfiction piece about my worst day in ĐÓ°Épro (and how a day like that can lead directly to the “figuring out” I mentioned). I started writing a novel in 2014, and after many, many submissions to agents—and many, many rejections—I finally signed with one. I felt like I’d made it, not realizing that it was just one step in a longer journey. A whole new round of rejections from publishers ended with that first novel getting set aside, but I’d been writing a second book to keep myself from going crazy, and in 2024, This Impossible Brightness was published.

My second novel, North of the Sunlit River, will be released this September. It’s set in ĐÓ°Épro and is about the ways in which lost loved ones can become greater than human—can become mythical—and how this act of myth-making can heal. Inspired by my time in Fairbanks and by my father, it was a way of finally getting him to ĐÓ°Épro, the place that left so much of its magic imprinted on me.

 

 

 

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