By Day Pesh Melba
"Do not go where the path may lead. Instead, go where
there is no path and leave a trail"
Day Pesh Melba, our friend, finished writing her novel, Craving Alaska, in 2003. Soon after it was completed she became ill and in 2005 succumbed to cancer at age 35. She was born, like her protagonist, in Hoboken, New Jersey, but lived in San Francisco, her beloved adopted hometown. By the time she died she had wandered, vagabond-style, through more than two dozen countries and six continents. When asked where her favorite country in the whole world was, she never hesitated to say Alaska. She had traveled extensively in the Great Land and had visited the Gwich’in Arctic Village, fictionalized here as Caribou Village. Her favorite book on Alaska was Two in the Far North by Margaret Murie. She also loved John McPhee’s Coming into the Country. Needless to say, she loved Alaskan cuisine—especially river salmon from the Kenai Peninsula, “gem of the sea” halibut, and of course moose and caribou. She agreed with cookbook author Cecilia Nibeck, “You can never really know a place until you taste it.”
Pesh Melba had spent time in nearly all corners of the forty-ninth state. Her last trip to Alaska was in March, 2002, to observe the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. She did not wish her novel to speak for the Athabascan tribe in the Far North, though she passionately wished to support their way of life. She entrusted us with two of her manuscripts, Craving Alaska and a collection of poetry not yet published.
We felt the time was nigh for publishing her novel. Publishers had rejected her book often based on its moral message being “shaky” or “too ambiguous.” Does an anti-hoax really redeem a deliberate hoax? Perhaps that is the wrong question, or perhaps the answer is more complex than a simple yes or no. The reader must consider that there are contingencies, mitigations, subplots—if absolutely no “alternative facts,” a present day euphemism for untruths. We live in an unprecedented time of fake news, a phrase we never heard so frequently if at all until 2017. Much worse than that, we see an unprecedented number of Americans, perhaps goaded on by social media, willing to blindly swallow the poison pills of bald-faced lies, prevarications that disrupt, cause chaos, and endanger lives everywhere. People elected to the highest offices in the land promote ludicrous Deep State conspiracies (when they should be serving the country) that have no basis or evidence in reality. By comparison, a charmingly imagined Mother Miriam Bliss does no harm. In fact, she does a lot of good. We were lucky to find a small publisher drawn to the entertainment value of Craving Alaska, who agreed with us that the reader should be the one to pass final judgment on the novel’s moral or lack thereof.
We must confess, we considered layering in more hoax by stating the book was certified by The Deep State. Our publisher discouraged the idea. The late author, who might have liked the added mischief, cannot weigh in or make any live appearances but who knows—maybe Mother Miriam Bliss will get invited to a reality show, or even the White House. It can happen—these days.
—Dona and Dante Adante San Francisco, 2020
Daphne G. Forest, anonymous food writer, is bold, brisk, and as barbed as the 1940s movie star she resembles. Mother Miriam Bliss is a flamboyant figment of her imagination, a sort of whimsical vindication for an editor who confused Daphne with facts, which she knows (for a fact) only tend to exist. When Daphne's fictitious commune of blasphemous gourmet wilderness nuns unexpectedly create a national stir, Daphne goes on the lam in Alaska, a frontier big enough for Italy and France to hide in. She meets Jason, a gold seeker, who introduces her to the native Gwich’in tribe in the Far North. Tribal leader Rachel King, who is fighting an uphill battle against Big Oil, stirs Daphne’s dormant sense of right and wrong and lands her on a whole new trajectory. That trajectory is about to collide with that of a gay commune in San Francisco, who have fallen hard and fast for Mother Miriam. They decide she and her wild sisters must materialize. What is real, what is magical, what is realistic magic and magical realism? The answers and more questions are found in the mythic and monumental proportions of the Great Land, Alyeska.
"Do not go where the path may lead. Instead, go where
there is no path and leave a trail"
More about Craving Alaska
Craving Alaska by the late Day Pesh Melba is a sexy, savory romp through the Great Land, aka the last frontier and the American Serengeti. The writing is bold and brisk, the characters, sassy, unconventional, and very woke. Vivid descriptions of Alaska take the reader from the rolling tundra of the Far North with its primeval caribou migrations to close-ups with wildlife from grizzlies to musk oxen. It’s an armchair journey to the dazzling blue ice of glaciers in the Inside Passage and to a native village where caribou cuisine has been stewing for millennia, maybe just waiting for the Lower Forty-eight to get hip to its taste. One heaping gulp may be all that’s needed to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from Big Oil’s nasty sullying. Daphne G. Forest, author of a runaway cookbook hoax, is just the person to cook up that scheme. Craving Alaska is really two novels in one, though neither could survive without the other. Forest may be the author of the wild foods hoax but it feeds right into the needs of a gay commune in San Francisco. And how it all comes full circle—well, must be savored to be believed!