Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Crossing the Waters
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1957
WEBSITE: http://www.leslieleylandfields.com/
CITY: Kodiak Island
STATE: AK
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.leslieleylandfields.com/biography/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 96006586
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n96006586
HEADING: Fields, Leslie Leyland, 1957-
000 00390cz a2200133n 450
001 3162488
005 19960126125052.2
008 960126n| acannaab |n aaa
010 __ |a n 96006586
035 __ |a (DLC)n 96006586
040 __ |a DLC |c DLC |d DLC
100 10 |a Fields, Leslie Leyland, |d 1957-
670 __ |a The entangling net, c1996: |b CIP t.p. (Leslie Leyland Fields) data sheet (b. 11/23/57)
953 __ |a sg24
PERSONAL
Born November 23, 1957; daughter of home-restoration workers; married Duncan Fields (a commercial salmon fisher), c. 1978; children: Naphtali (daughter), Noah, Elisha, Isaac, Abraham, Micah.
EDUCATION:Cedarville University, B.A., 1979; University of Oregon, M.A. (English) and M.A. (journalism), both 1985; Goddard College, M.F.A., 1995.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Fields’ Wild Salmon, Harvester Island, AK, co-owner and seasonal commercial salmon fisher, 1978-; Northern Pen, Kodiak, AK, writer, editor, and mentor, 2009-. Seattle Pacific University, member of fine arts faculty, between 2003 and 2011; Covenant College, writer in residence; also taught at University of Alaska. Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, founder and teacher; national speaker on faith and culture; guest on radio programs.
AVOCATIONS:Travel.
AWARDS:Virginia Faulkner Award; Genesis Award; Book Award, Christianity Today, for Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including America and the Sea: A Maritime History; Best Essays Northwest; It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters; A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild; and On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors. Contributor of poems and essays to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Bellingham Review, Christian Science Monitor, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Books, and Culture, Northern Review, Orion, and Seattle Review. Member of editorial board, Christianity Today.
Fields’s work has been translated into several languages, including Chinese, French, German, Korean, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian.
SIDELIGHTS
Leslie Leyland Fields writes creative nonfiction about life in the Pacific Far North. Her own life began at the other end of the country. She was raised in New England in the 1960s until her quest for a college education led her westward to Ohio. There she met and fell in love with a young Alaskan salmon fisher named Duncan Fields. At age twenty Leslie moved to Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, married into Duncan’s multigenerational fishing family, and devoted herself to the harrowing and isolated life of salmon fishing at—sometimes beyond—the edge of civilization.
Surviving the Island of Grace
In Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska, Fields records her harsh awakening to the realities of life at a frozen fish camp eight miles away from the Alaskan mainland. The travails of her first winter nearly defeat her, but, with the aid of her Christian faith, the author flourishes. Every summer Fields and her extended family move to the otherwise uninhabited Harvester Island eighty miles west of Kodiak. There they fish for salmon, forage for berries, tend a garden, and preserve their bounty for the brutal winter ahead. Fields spends the winter months in graduate school, earning three master’s degrees along the way and teaching classes in creative writing. She begins to publish magazine articles, and her memoir becomes the first book of many.
Critics were touched by Fields’s depiction of backbreaking toil, an unforgiving landscape, the unpredictable weather, and the life-threatening challenges that the family faced at home and at sea. “Fields’ memoir is haunting in its imagery, uplifting in its message,” reported Carol Haggas in her Booklist review. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted: “Vivid details and intelligent insights invigorate this celebration of the human spirit at work.” A Publishers Weekly commentator predicted: “Readers with pioneer envy will get vicarious thrills from this high-energy memoir.”
Surprise Child
Time passed, and Fields’s life settled into a familiar, if unpredictable, routine. As she approached her forties and her four children were headed toward adulthood, she began to think about life after parenthood. She was teaching at a university, and her career as a writer and editor was gaining momentum. Then she received the stunning news that she was pregnant again.
Fields was devastated. Among her first responses was disbelief: the test must be wrong; she couldn’t possibly be pregnant. Then came the numbing sense of fear that she couldn’t possibly endure another pregnancy at her age. Not only did she survive, but mere months after the birth of child number five, Fields learned that she was pregnant with child number six. She also learned that she was not alone. Fields began to collect the stories of other women who had found themselves in a similar situation.
Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy offers more than two dozen stories of surprise pregnancies and the women who face an uncertain future, usually with fear. They are women who did not welcome pregnancy, and not all of them carried babies to full term. Many were facing single parenthood, for one reason or another. “Surprise Child is written by Fields for women like Fields,” wrote Dave Andrusko in the National Right to Life News. Her goal was to offer them the support and encouragement that was not available to her. Andrusko added that, even for men like him, Surprise Child is “an immensely important book, one that prods your mind, touches your heart, and speaks to your soul.”
Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers
Fields continued to face soul-searing challenges. When her two youngest sons were toddlers, she learned that her father was facing imminent death. Estranged from him for decades, she felt compelled to schedule one last meeting with the man who had neglected her and abused her sister when they were young. Fields took her own children back east to meet Grandpa, and she began her own painful journey to forgiveness.
In Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding Freedom from Hurt and Hate, Fields lays out the stepping stones that enabled her to achieve her objective: “avoidance; confession; humanizing our offender; connecting fully with our own experience of hurt; facing bitterness; connecting with God’s forgiveness; choosing to honor people … ; creating a new family legacy,” as cited by Michelle Van Loon in her review at Patheos, and finally arriving at forgiveness. Fields seasons her essays with numerous examples from scripture, messages that spiritual readers found especially enlightening. She stresses that forgiveness may or may not heal the transgressor, but it offers freedom to the long-suffering victim who has been laboring under a burden of bitterness and resentment.
Crossing the Waters
Her Christian faith has guided Fields through many stormy seas. In Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas she compares the life journey of her family of salmon fishers to the New Testament stories of Jesus and his disciples on the Sea of Galilee. She even traveled personally to the River Jordan to experience fishing in a small boat as the disciples would have done. A Publishers Weekly contributor reported that readers “will see familiar Bible passages come alive in her contextualized retellings.”
Fields has also compiled essay collections that reflect the diverse experiences of other fishers and seafarers she has known. Each collection also contains her own reflections on the business that captured her heart so long ago. The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives shines a spotlight on the unsung women who have found fulfillment in the traditionally male fishing industry. Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men, and the Oceans They Fish contains stories from seafaring icons and greenhorns alike, professional writers and apprentices as well. “As anthologies go,” wrote Jerry Fraser in the National Fisherman, “this is a pretty good one.” What emerges, he claimed, is “a picture of fishermen as it should be: not so much a portrait as a collage.” Hooked! True Stories of Obsession, Death, and Love from Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Men and Women is a similar collection that, according to Newsminer contributor Libbie Martin, “gives a voice to the wonder, awe, fear, discouragement, anger and mania that grab hold of certain people and don’t let them go.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Fields, Leslie Leyland, Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas, Cascade Books (Eugene, OR), 2010.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, editor, The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1997.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, editor, Hooked! True Stories of Obsession, Death, and Love from Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Men and Women, Epicenter Press (Kenmore, WA), 2011.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, editor, Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men, and the Oceans They Fish, Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2001.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, “Parenting Is Your Highest Calling”: And 8 Other Myths that Trap Us in Worry and Guilt, WaterBrook Press (Colorado Springs, CO), 2006.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, editor, The Spirit of Food: Thirty-four Writers on Feasting and Fasting toward God, Epicenter Press (Kenmore, WA), 2008.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy, Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2001.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir of Alaska, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1997, Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2002, 2nd edition published as Surviving the Island of Grace: A Life on the Wild Edge of America, Epicenter Press (Kenmore, WA), 2008.
Fields, Leslie Leyland, and Jill Hubbard, Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding Freedom from Hurt and Hate, WaterBrook Press (Colorado Springs, CO), 2008.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2001, David Pitt, review of Out on the Deep Blue, p. 23; September 1, 2002, Carol Haggas, review of Surviving the Island of Grace, p. 47.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2001, review of Out on the Deep Blue, p. 996; August 1, 2002, review of Surviving the Island of Grace, p. 1092.
National Fisherman, March, 2002, Jerry Fraser, review of Out on the Deep Blue, p. 9.
National Right to Life News, May, 2006, Dave Andrusko, review of Surprise Child, p. 10.
Publishers Weekly, August 19, 2002, review of Surviving the Island of Grace, p. 77; December 9, 2013, review of Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers, p. 66; August 8, 2016, review of Crossing the Waters, p. 60.
ONLINE
Armchair Interviews, http://www.armchairinterviews.com/ (April 17, 2017), Jamie Driggers, review of “Parenting Is Your Highest Calling.”
Christian Post, http://www.christianpost.com/ (January 17, 2014), Jessica Martinez, author interview.
Leslie Leyland Fields Home Page, http://www.leslieleylandfields.com (April 17, 2017).
National Fisherman Online, https://www.nationalfisherman.com/ (January 25, 2012), Jen Finn, review of Hooked!
Newsminer, http://www.newsminer.com/ (March 18, 2012), Libbie Martin, review of Hooked!
Patheos, http://www.patheos.com/ (March 21, 2014), Michelle Van Loon, review of Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers.
Sharon R. Hoover Home Page, http://sharonrhoover.com/ (October 29, 2016), author interview.
Smash Words, https://www.smashwords.com/ (April 17, 2017), author interview.
Wildflower Faith, http://wildflowerfaith.com/ (May 5, 2014), review of Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers.
Writing for Your Life, https://writingforyourlife.com/ (April 17, 2017), author profile.
Author of 9 books and numerous essays in national publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Christianity Today, Image, Christian Science Monitor, Best Essays Northwest, etc.
Professor of English at U. of Alaska. Writer-in-residence or Visiting Writer at colleges and universities. Founder and Leader of Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, Professional editor and writing mentor through The Northern Pen.
Experience
Company Name The Northern Pen
Dates Employed Nov 2009 – Present Employment Duration 7 yrs 6 mos
Location Kodiak, Alaska
Seattle Pacific University, Master of Fine Arts Faculty Mentor
Dates Employed Jun 2003 – Jun 2011 Employment Duration 8 yrs 1 mo
Education
Goddard College
Degree Name M.F.A.
Field Of Study Creative Nonfiction
Dates attended or expected graduation 1992 – 1995
University of Oregon
Degree Name M.A.
Field Of Study English
Dates attended or expected graduation 1983 – 1985
University of Oregon
Degree Name M.A.
Field Of Study Journalism
Dates attended or expected graduation 1982 – 1985
Cedarville University
Degree Name B.A.
Field Of Study English
Dates attended or expected graduation 1975 – 1979
“TELL ME WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO AND I WILL TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE” --JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSETT
What do I attend to?
Two Islands
I live on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in a house on a cliff over the North Pacific waters of the Gulf of Alaska. The windows in my writing room, washed by hard-spray winds, stand watch over loons, coveys of sea ducks and two pairs of bald eagles who ride the cliff’s updrafts to the eaves over my head. Sometimes they are the fierce muse that I need as I sit searching for the words that belong in the next essay or book– but often, as they stand on the spire of rock stripping the guts of a salmon or a murre for their meal, I watch, still astonished, all words lost.
I live on another island as well. Every summer, since 1978, I move to Harvester Island off the west coast of Kodiak Island, where my husband and I and our 6 children are the island’s only inhabitants. Here we work in a family fishing operation, Fields’ Wild Salmon in an intensive four month season of commercial salmon fishing. We subsistence fish, hunt and gather here as well, smoking, pickling, canning and freezing salmon and halibut for the winter; making our own jellies from our island berries and growing in our garden whatever our cold short summers will allow.
Other Places
It’s not enough to know our home well. Lest we think there is only one place to live or way to live it, we travel out into the world. Through the 1980’s, my husband and I traveled via expedition truck, double-decker bus, and backpack throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia, S.E. Asia, and Africa. We came back changed. We did it again a few years ago, taking our kids out of school and traveling for a year throughout the U.S. and Central America. We are planning another year abroad--in Europe, Africa and Asia---in 2018.
One Another
It’s a great joy to be able to speak and meet so many caring, thoughtful people. I travel throughout North America to speak at universities, seminars, churches and retreats on matters of faith, literature, food, forgiveness, Creation Care, family relationships, and the writing life. (See link for topics) I love doing radio as well, and have appeared on hundreds of radio shows including Chris Fabry Live! Keepin’ the Faith (Illinois NPR), Family Life Radio with Dennis Rainey, Focus on the Family, Prime Time America, Prime Time Chicago.
Words and Word
I write for Christianity Today , CT Women, In Touch magazine and various other publications.
The classroom has been fertile ground for words as well. I've been teaching in undergraduate and graduate programs throughout the last 25 years, as an adjunct, as a professor, and then as a founding member of Seattle Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts program. I've been the Nick Barker writer-in-residence at Covenant College twice and teach writing workshops around the country through the Frederick Buechner Center, Writing for Your Life, and other entities.
I am the founder of the Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, bringing well-known writers (Phillip Yancey, Luci Shaw, Ann Voskamp, Bret Lott, Jeanne Murray Walker, Gina Ochsner ) to co-teach in the art, craft and faith of Writing.
Between speaking and writing, I also run a professional writing business, The Northern Pen, performing manuscript critique, mentoring and editing in all stages of creative, professional, and academic writing.
My tenth book, Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt and the Seas won Christianity Today's Book Award for Christian Living/Discipleship. Other books are these:
Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers:Finding Freedom from Hate and Hurt Thomas Nelson, 2014).
The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God,
Hooked! True Stories of Obsession, Death and Love from Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Men and Women,
Parenting is Your Highest Calling...and Eight Other Myths (Waterbrook),
Surviving the Island of Grace (Thomas Dunne),
Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy,
Out on the Deep Blue (St. Martin’s),
The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (Univ. of Illinois Press) and
The Water Under Fish (poetry).
Does this do it, then? Do these spheres of attention encompass a life to say what it is and what it means, why a life goes on where and as it does? Let me use someone else’s words to finish:
. . . all our stories are, in the end, one story, one vast story about being human, being together, being here. Does the story point beyond itself? Does it mean something? What is the truth of this interminable, sprawling story we all of us share? . . . Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn’t mean a damn thing. You pay your money and you take your choice. ---Frederick Buechner
***********************
Leslie is the author/editor of ten books. Her eleventh is forthcoming from Kregel (the Best Half of Our Lives: 40 Incredible WOmen Over 40 Celebrate their First-evers, Never-Agains, and Always-Until-I-Die Moments)
Her books have been translated into Slovak, German, Chinese, French, Polish, Ukrainian, Korean and German and reviewed in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, The Chicago Tribune, the Utne Reader, Sports Illustrated for Women, The Portland Oregonian, The Seattle Times, Women and Health, Oregon Review, and many others.
Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Books and Culture, Best Essays Northwest, Christianity Today, It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, America and the Sea: A Maritime History, and many others.
Her poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, the Bellingham Review, the Northern Review, Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes, and many more.
Education:
Cedarville University, B.A. English
University of Oregon, M.A. English
University of Oregon, M.A. Journalism
Goddard College, M.F.A. Creative Nonfiction
Book Review: Crossing The Waters
We all have books that become milestones in this life’s journey. Crossing The Waters just became my latest marker.
Leslie Leyland Fields led me through the hard parts of faith so I could more honestly examine my own life as a Christ-follower. Fields tackles the difficult issues of suffering, the existence of hell, broken relationships, unrealized promises of Scripture, and so much more. Through her vulnerability, she drew me along (nodding my head as I too have struggled) and softened my heart so I could hear the hard lessons.
With each page I waded deeper into the biblical truths. Fields illustrated profound theological truths with action-filled stories from her decades in a commercial fishing family as well as exploration of the fisherman’s life on the Sea of Galilee. I promise you will never be bored! As I became more intimately familiar with the profession shared by many of the first disciples, familiar Bible passages took on new meaning. Jesus calming the storm, Peter walking on water, feeding the 5000, and calming the storm at sea feel now more like experiences than distant, unrelatable stories.
Leslie and Sharon with Crossing The Water
Trying to talk but the wind (and laughter) took our breath away.
I recently had the opportunity to hang out with Leslie in Alaska. We chatted about her book and her research…
How much research went into Crossing The Waters?
Leslie: I did a ton of research! Going to Israel, of course and hiking the Gospel Trail solo was the most fun “research,” and going out on a couple of fishing boats with real commercial fishermen. That was exciting and illuminating. Then—researching my own life, so to speak. I’ve kept journals out at fish camp for years. Those have proved vital. I can’t believe how much I forget without that record! We really can’t fully trust our own memories.Then just good old fashioned crack-the-book kind of research about the Jewish culture of Jesus’ day, about the gospels themselves. Whenever I start a new writing project, I buy probably 25 – 40 books. It’s one of the things I love about writing—that I get to keep studying and learning, and occasionally I even get paid for it!
What was the hardest thing about writing Crossing The Waters?
Crossing the Waters
Casually posing with Leslie’s new book, Crossing The Waters
Leslie: I wanted to quit at times while writing this book. I gave myself a ridiculously hard assignment: to weave three narratives and experiences together into a single narrative that would pull the reader all the way through the book.The first chapters came easily, the last half was a huge challenge. I kept thinking, Leslie, why did you do this to yourself? But there was a reason, of course. I believed that these narratives were essentially bound together through Jesus. Jesus does “hold all things together,” as it says in Colossians. It’s been very rewarding to hear from readers that “they couldn’t put the book down.” I think in all forms of creative nonfiction, our books should have that narrative drive, that sense of, “What’s going to happen next?”
Do you view writing as a spiritual practice?
Leslie: Writing is indeed a spiritual practice for me. I feel closest to God when I’m out exploring his world with my camera and my senses, and when I’m exploring his world on the page, through language. Both are attempts to see through dark glasses and past foggy mirrors into the light that illuminates everything, the light of Christ. But I can’t find that light simply through my own words alone. I have to draw from a larger vocabulary—from the lexicon of God’s own Word. Those words, planted deep through reading and prayer, then, I hope, clear my vision.
Crossing the WatersHow can readers best connect with you?
Leslie: The best place to find me is on my blog, where I post photo-essays from my life here on two Alaskan islands. And Facebook is a great place to stay connected!
Back to me: Pick up Leslie’s book on Amazon. How do you like my artsy picture of her book (to the right) on the shores of Harvester Island in Alaska? The day was perfect for photos and the book behaved nicely wherever placed. :)
Posted by Sharon R Hoover
Interview: Author of 'Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers' Talks About Letting Go of Resentment
Image: Data:image/Gif;Base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAD/ACwAAAAAAQABAAACADs%3D
Share On Facebook
Image: Data:image/Gif;Base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAD/ACwAAAAAAQABAAACADs%3D
Share On Twitter
BY JESSICA MARTINEZ , CP REPORTER
Jan 17, 2014 | 2:34 PM
Advertisement: 0:06
This is a modal window.The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
This is a modal window.The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
This is a modal window.The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Leslie Leyland Fields, an Alaska-based author and public speaker, overcame the emotional hurt she latched onto for over 20 years due to her father's abuse by forgiving him in his old age before he passed. After longing to be free from her hatred towards him, Fields began the difficult journey of forgiveness as she illustrates in her latest book, Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding Freedom from Hurt and Hate.
Drawing from her personal experience along with the clinical perspective of Southern California-based psychologist, Jill Hubbard, Fields writes about the power in letting go of resentment and returning the power of judgment against a mother or father to God.
She emphasizes that individuals should forgive their parents and that no one is exempt from being pardoned since God Himself bestows mercy upon everyone. Fields writes that even though a person grapples with deep hurt it is possible to become capable of honoring parents.
An edited transcript of Field's interview with The Christian Post is below:
CP: What specifically prompted you to write this book?
Fields: I got a phone call one day that my father had been in the hospital. I hadn't seen him for eight years then. It occurred to me that if he died, no one might know for days and I would not cry, perhaps no one would cry. It felt like that would be one of the worst tragedies, that someone lived, had six children, died, and no one would cry.
CP: For most people, letting go of their pain is very difficult, which makes it nearly impossible to pardon their offenders. But you write about the difference between the cost of forgiving and the cost of not forgiving, what is the distinction?
Close ad X
Fields: Forgiving others does cost us a lot. It's important to remember that. But not forgiving exacts a greater cost to ourselves, to the ones we need to forgive, and even to the world at large. In each case, we're losing the chance to heal a part of what L. Gregory Jones, author of Embodying Forgiveness, calls the "universal disaster of sinful brokenness." We're stuck in that brokenness ourselves if we don't extend the gospel, which is about mercy, into these hard places and relationships.
CP: How about forgiveness and reconciliation, is there a difference between the two?
Fields: Forgiveness is really a two-way release. It means releasing others from the debts and sins they have committed against us, and at the same time releasing ourselves as judge, jury and prison guard over them because that's God's position.
Ideally, the ruptured relationship can be restored so there is some kind of harmony and God wants forgiveness to lead to reconciliation. However, some people are so destructive, and some sins are so heinous that reconciliation and restoration is impossible or unwise.
CP: How did you get to a place in which you were able to forgive your father?
Fields: The decision to forgive was a quick decision although it was about 20 years later than it should have been. However, living it out was a much longer process. I had to learn to see beyond my own hurt as a daughter to be able to see my father as a human being who had suffered a lot in his life. As part of that, I had to stop looking to him to fulfill needs he was never going to fulfill. That enabled me to move from what C.S. Lewis calls "need love" to "gift love."
CP: Is resentment and hurt more common among children and parents in American families than we know?
Fields: Absolutely. We're so caught in our individual lives, so busy chasing happiness and so mobile as a people, that we've left our families behind. There's an incalculable amount of hurt and damage out there. Resentment and hurt from our parents is nothing new, it's part of the brokenness of the world we're born into and it perpetuates itself generation after generation until it's interrupted by forgiveness and mercy.
CP: You also write about honoring your mother and father, as commanded in the bible, but how can someone do good to an individual who they think does not deserve it?
Fields: We have to realize that we're not the ones who get to choose who is worthy of honor and who isn't. There's no qualifying phrase in the commandment "honor your father and mother." It's consistent with the whole gospel, which tells us even to "love our enemies." We're sinners and debtors ourselves before God and His goodness has not come to us because we deserve it either.
CP: Can a person forgive their parent after they have passed? Is it possible to completely heal from their emotional wounds in that case?
Fields: I think forgiveness is so powerful that it can move backward in time. We can still forgive a parent who has passed, because in many ways, they're alive in our memories. When we hear their voice in our head, when we remember a hurtful action, we can choose to be wounded and angry all over again, or we can see those actions through the fuller lens of understanding and compassion. As many times as we remember, we can choose to forgive. Forgiveness will not erase the past, but it can eventually diminish the hurt of the past and its power over us.
CP: Often times, as noted in your book, parents mistreat their children because they were probably mistreated by their own parents. Do most people see that as generational curses that they need to break?
Fields: It's cliché but it's true that hurt people, hurt people. Some of this is simply the consequence of living in a dying world, but people need to know that these behaviors and wounds passed down from one generation to another can be stopped any time. As we go forward into a new life, it's up to us to extend the mercy and forgiveness we've received to others in our family. It's possible for whole families to be healed and made whole.
CP: What if a parent doesn't accept their faults, how can a person receive closure for their hurt in that case?
Fields: Forgiveness is not about confronting people with their faults and our hurts to extract an apology. Forgiveness is about loving the other person, letting their offenses go, knowing we are all sinners. However, if a parent continues to harm you or others, then we're talking about a need for intervention, or therapy. Most of the time closure will not come from your parents, it comes from God.
CP: In order to begin the forgiveness process, you write that people need to train their spirits in compassion, how can a person begin to do that?
Fields: We can begin by practicing kindness. Look beyond your own needs to the needs and wounds of your parents. Listen to their stories, their losses. Begin with small acts of mercy, and you'll find that there is joy in bringing joy, even to someone you may not like very much at the time. You'll find your heart inching outward and you may even come to love that difficult father or mother.
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/interview-author-of-forgiving-our-fathers-and-mothers-talks-about-letting-go-of-resentment-112854/#CPioETMrcTLVcvBD.99
Leslie Leyland Fields
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[hide]This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
This article is an orphan, as no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; try the Find link tool for suggestions. (February 2016)
The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies. (February 2016)
This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. (February 2016)
This article needs more links to other articles to help integrate it into the encyclopedia. (February 2016)
Leslie Leyland Fields is an American author and editor from Kodiak Island, Alaska.[1][2]
Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, Polish, Korean and German and reviewed in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, The Chicago Tribune, the Utne Reader, Sports Illustrated for Women, The Portland Oregonian, The Seattle Times, Women and Health, Oregon Review, and many others.
Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Books and Culture, Best Essays Northwest, Christianity Today, It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, America and the Sea: A Maritime History, and many others earning her Pushcart nominations, the Virginia Faulkner Award, and a Genesis Award. She was a founding faculty member of Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program where she taught creative nonfiction for six years. Previously she taught Literature and creative writing at the University of Alaska. She is on the Editorial Board of Christianity Today; a national speaker addressing topics of faith and culture at conferences, retreats, and churches; and a popular radio guest with more than 200 interviews on stations around the country.
Her poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, the Bellingham Review, the Northern Review, Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes, and many more.
Contents [hide]
1 Bibliography
2 Education
3 References
4 External links
Bibliography[edit]
The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God[3]
Hooked! True Stories of Obsession, Death and Love from Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Men and Women
Parenting is Your Highest Calling...and Eight Other Myths (Waterbrook)
Surviving the Island of Grace (Thomas Dunne)
Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy
Out on the Deep Blue (St. Martin’s)
The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (Univ. of Illinois Press)
The Water Under Fish (poetry).
Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers:Finding Freedom from Hate and Hurt (Thomas Nelson, 2014).[4]
Education[edit]
Cedarville University, B.A. English
University of Oregon, M.A. English
University of Oregon, M.A. Journalism
Goddard College, M.F.A. Creative Nonfiction
A resident of Kodiak, Alaska, Leslie Leyland Fields is a wife, mother of six, commercial fisher, world traveler, writer, editor, and teacher of creative nonfiction in Seattle Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts Program. For more information, visit www.leslie-leyland-fields.com.
Leslie is the author of seven books including The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God (Waterbrook Press, div. of Random House) Surprise Child (Waterbrook Press, div. of Random House), Surviving the Island of Grace (Thomas Dunne), Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Oceans They Fish (St. Martin’s), The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives (Univ. of Illinois Press), and The Water Under Fish (Trout Creek Press).
Her books have been reviewed in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, The Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated for Women, The Portland Oregonian, The Seattle Times, Women and Health, the Utne Reader, Oregon Review, and many others.
Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Best Essays Northwest, Christianity Today, It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, America and the Sea: A Maritime History, and many others. Her poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, the Bellingham Review, the Northern Review, Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes, and many more
Leslie Leyland Fields is the author/editor of ten books. Her latest book, Crossing the Waters, won Christianity Today’s 2017 Book of the Year for Christian Living. Her previous books include Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers:Finding Freedom from Hate and Hurt, The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God, Hooked! True Stories of Obsession, Death and Love from Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Men and Women, Parenting is Your Highest Calling…and Eight Other Myths, Surviving the Island of Grace, Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy, Out on the Deep Blue, The Entangling Net: Alaska’s Commercial Fishing Women Tell Their Lives, and The Water Under Fish (poetry). Her books have been translated into Chinese, French, Polish, Ukainian, Slovak, Korean and German.
She has won a number of Evangelical Press awards for her articles, which have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Beliefnet, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Books and Culture, Best Essays Northwest, Christianity Today, It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters, On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, America and the Sea: A Maritime History, and many others.
Leslie loves to share her passion for all thing Art and Faith. She speaks and teaches around the country and internationally in universities, churches, conferences and writing workshops. She taught creative nonfiction in Seattle Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts program for six years. She is the founder of The Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop, set on her island in Alaska that attracts writers nationally and internationally. Her guest writers have included Bret Lott, Luci Shaw, Phillip Yancey, Jeanne Murray Walker and others.
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 1/12
Print Marked Items
Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus Through
the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas
Publishers Weekly.
263.32 (Aug. 8, 2016): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus Through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas
Leslie Leyland Fields. NavPress, $15.99 trade paper (256p) ISBN 9781631466021
Fields is a 38year Alaskan commercial fisherwoman whose experience on and off the water guides readers through
faith's treacherous depths. To begin this memoircumtestament, she shares her often harrowing experiences on the
waters as her family fishes for their livelihood season after exhausting season. Fields also parallels her personal story
with that of Jesus's relationship with his disciples on the Sea of Galilee. She traveled to the Jordan River and, once
there, found herself on a tiny boat with other fishermen learning the practices of fishing far from home. Throughout her
text, Fields describes her life, challenges, and moments of doubt, skillfully pairing her own story with those of how
Jesus and his disciples may have dealt with similar concerns during their own times. Readers of faith will appreciate
the colorful depiction of both the land and sea that Fields offers, and they<< will see familiar Bible passages come alive
in her contextualized retellings>>. In this helpful account, Fields displays a remarkable knack for exploring those
treasures that lie underneath the surface. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus Through the Storms, the Fish, the Doubt, and the Seas." Publishers Weekly, 8
Aug. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460900423&it=r&asid=6d57532a492c439ded0c4aad01f848fc.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460900423
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 2/12
Fields, Leslie Leyland. Surviving the Island of
Grace
Carol Haggas
Booklist.
99.1 (Sept. 1, 2002): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2002 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Oct. 2002. 352p. illus. St. Martin's, $24.95 (031229140X). 818.
To deem this solely a memoir of her life spent as the wife of a salmon fisherman on a remote Alaskan island would be
missing the boat, so to speak, for Fields' powerful, poetic essays deal with themes as large as the great outdoors in
which she struggles to make her way and find her place. Barely out of her teens, Fields marries Duncan, determined to
share the life he loves, every backbreaking hour of it; sailing the open ocean in a tiny skiff, harvesting salmon the way
it has always been done: dragging them in by nets, picking them out by hand. Just as Thoreau went to the woods to live
deliberately, so, too, do the Fields live on this ocean, without electricity or telephones, with bears and eagles as their
constant companions, choosing it as much for what it offers as for what it omits. Paying homage to man's flexibility
and gratitude for God's grace, <
Haggas, Carol
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "Fields, Leslie Leyland. Surviving the Island of Grace." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2002, p. 47. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA92084271&it=r&asid=8e66cab2ab218e498f66eb6f1516d22f.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A92084271
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 3/12
Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected
Pregnancy By Leslie Leyland Fields Waterbrook
Press, 2006, 160 pages (Book Review)
National Right to Life News.
33.5 (May 2006): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2006 National Right to Life Committee, Inc.
http://www.nrlc.org/
Full Text:
When I noticed that I had dashed off eight or nine typewritten pages worth of notes about a book that is only 160 pages
long, I smiled, realizing this only confirmed what I had known by the time I finished the Introduction to Surprise
Child. Leslie Leyland Fields has written <
then share with others.
The rough outlines of her story are as simple as the tangle of emotions an unexpected pregnancy can bring in its wake
is complex. Already the mother of four (three boys and a girl), she had finally got the job she wanted: a tenuretrack
position as an assistant professor of English at a state university.
Although she had written two books and edited another largely about life as a commercial salmon fishing family on a
remote island, a college professorship is not necessarily something you'd expect for someone who lives nine miles
north of nowherea "house on a cliff over the salty North Pacific waters of the Gulf of Alaska on Kodiak Island."
And then, her life firmly on track, wham, she's pregnant in her forties. Seemingly a blink of an eye later, she is
pregnant again.
Surprise Child is loving in spirit and lifeaffirming in every way that matters. When you finish the final chapter, you'll
feel like cheering, as if you'd just watched Rocky. The stories of the 25 or so women chronicled in the book are a
testimony to the power of the human spirit and the strength that faith in a loving God provides.
But Surprise Child is also brutally, unflinchingly honest.
Fields has interviewed women who had no intention of being pregnant, or who had made their peace with infertility or
an inability to carry a baby to term, or who had arranged their lives around the sure knowledge that changing diapers
was just a distant memory.
There are no doubt women who "knew" there would never be childbearing days (or were convinced they were history),
only to discover otherwise, who meet this sharp Uturn with equanimity. This book is not about them.
Surprise Child tells the story of women (of any age) who watch with dread to see whether a line will appear in the
pregnancy test stick. When the results are positive, they feel (as Fields did initially) overwhelmed by the "darkness of
anxiety, resistance, and fear."
<
were few and far between and none particularly helpful. She writes to convince women that they have what it takes to
carry their baby to term, regardless of circumstances or the siren call to abort.
As I told her in a phone interview, as a man, a husband, and a father of four, reading the book I felt like I was
eavesdropping on a conversation between women. But Fields told me that some of the most poignant early responses
to Surprise Child have come from men. "I never knew" might be a good summary of their comments.
Thus the book is also for the men in these women's lives, for crisis pregnancy center volunteers, for church members
who might be lulled into thinking that an unexpected pregnancy poses no challenges for a woman of faith, for extended
familyall of whom might not have the faintest clue about the existential dread that can wash over women.
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 4/12
Fields, for example, was utterly devastated. A woman who loved being a mother, all she could think was that "Just as I
had emerged into relative light and safety," her life had been dramatically changed. She was "starting all over."
"What did I do in those first minutes?" she writes. "I stood over the test stick frozen, my breath gone for seconds, Then
suddenly with a convulsive shake I sucked in the air I had lost; my heart went mad with drumming; my hands fisted,
then went limp. And then I began to run shouting, looking for someone to help me carry this."
Surprise Child provides priceless advice to women and girls facing an unplanned pregnancy. However, nothing is more
valuable than her shrewd insight into the rush of emotions that threaten to steamroll a woman when she discovers she
is pregnant with a child she had not anticipated.
"You are trying to live out the next two or three years of your life in these thirty minutes, in one day," Fields writes.
"Everything you fear visits you in one crushing blow. You feel weak, vulnerable. You think you cannot do it. You are
rightit is impossible to live it all, to answer all these deep needs and fears in a single hour or a single day or week. As
each day passes, some of your fears will fade; some will disappear entirely; some may slowly become reality. But in
this moment, you do not need to answer all the questions. There will be time in each day to find answers, to find
reasons to hope."
In that same Introduction, Fields will fastforward to tell the reader, "Each one here had her life interrupted, each one
here has a child who came to her unbidden, and each one now cannot imagine her life without the child." But just
because we know there is a happy ending does not diminish in any way the power of Fields' riveting narrative.
She intertwines the stories of women who faced down their deep apprehensions with an explanation of her own unborn
children's development and, concomitantly, her own feelings as the pregnancy advances. Like the other women in the
book, Fields had been absolutely convinced she "can't be pregnant."
They "can't" be because their boyfriend doesn't want the baby, or because they already have four children under five, or
because they are about to be the first one in their family to go to college, or because their husband is about to be
deployed to Iraq, or because they have an eldest child with significant disabilities, or ... "So many bad situations!"
Fields writes.
But Surprise Child tells us that for all this, women can and do persevere. Their stories are miniature profiles in
courage, the kind that humble the reader.
Fields is not a Pollyanna. She fully realizes that women do take the lives of their unborn children, misled into thinking
that the road to "freedom" and "growth" passes through the abortionist's curettage. In fact, the exact opposite is the
truth.
More than one woman whispered to Fields that the child had "saved my life." In some cases, this was literally true.
Leading lives of selfdestruction, they suddenly realized that they could no longer do drugs or go on alcoholic binges.
Others became better, richer human beings because they "did not give into fear."
I could go on for pages but let me conclude with a lengthy quote from Fields, one that captures the heart of her
message of encouragement.
"You did not listen to those who may have urged you to end this pregnancy. You have changed your life, sustained
other losses to bring this baby to light and air. And now you have something to show for these months and sacrifices:
beautiful bone and flesh and blood of your very bone. But there is more. You are more than you once were. You
emerge from this birth more resilient and resourceful, wider and deeper than the woman who stared unbelieving at a
test stick forty weeks ago. You've traveled so far and done so much. Rest now in all you have created and become."
You can learn more about Leslie Leyland Fields and order the book by going first to www.surprisechild.com.
Dave Andrusko
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Surprise Child: Finding Hope in Unexpected Pregnancy By Leslie Leyland Fields Waterbrook Press, 2006, 160 pages
(Book Review)." National Right to Life News, May 2006, p. 10. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA145709631&it=r&asid=cd4c49edd0805cb3545e7fa691d8e253.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 5/12
Gale Document Number: GALE|A145709631
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 6/12
Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir.
(Nonfiction)
Kirkus Reviews.
70.15 (Aug. 1, 2002): p1092.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fields, Leslie Leyland
Dunne/St. Martin's (352 pp.)
$24.95
Oct. 17, 2002
ISBN: 031229140X
From the author/editor of several books about commercial fishing (Out on the Deep Blue, 2001, etc.), a more personal
work chronicling her 23 summers spent pulling salmon from Alaskan waters.
Fields (English/Univ. of Alaska, Kodiak) balances the gritty details of this rigorous endeavorcheck out the superb
analysis of why a person's hands are the precision tools of fishingwith as affirmation of life lessons learned along the
way. Raised in New England, she attended college in Ohio, where she met husband Duncan, a native Alaskan from a
fishing family. They were drawn together, she writes, "by a mutual love of philosophy and theology," and this shared
interest makes her memoir as much a chronicle of spiritual journey as a recollection of her life in fishing. Recollections
of as impoverished childhoodshe was one of six children abandoned by their father, who helped their mother restore
old housesalternate with accounts of her adult life. Fields describes the fishing seasons she worked, beginning as a
newlywed in 1978, as well as journeys to Asia and to Africa made before she settled down to raise two children.
Though strong, she found fishing daunting: the hours were long; the weather capricio us; and the way of life tougher
than she'd anticipated. (Scarce water supplies, for example, turned bathing and laundry into major chores.) She was
close to Duncan's family, but as the years passed she found the fishing season straining her marriage: there was no time
to talk to her husband; and after the children were born, she feared medical emergencies (travel between their island
and Kodiak, where the nearest doctors were, was always dangerous). But faith and her realization that life on the island
was part of "the grace that sustains" have reconciled her to a choice she made all but unknowingly at age 20.
<
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir. (Nonfiction)." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2002, p. 1092. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA90933710&it=r&asid=90b59483f71b0ccf4f8b7c02bd16a4b2.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A90933710
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 7/12
Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir.
(Nonfiction)
Publishers Weekly.
249.33 (Aug. 19, 2002): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2002 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
LESLIE LEYLAND FIELDS. St. Martin's, $24.95 (352p) ISBN 031229140X
<
including the occasional stomachturning description of dead marine lifeFields delivers the lowdown on 23 years of
commercial salmon fishing on a remote island off Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. In the summer of 1978, Fields,
an East Coast literary type, gamely followed her fiance, Duncan, to his family's generationsold fish camp, where she
was unceremoniously ushered into her new workplace: 42degree water. Fields's unflinching descriptions of spending
her first winter eight miles (by water) from the nearest human being and telephone (shared by 100 people) are enough
to make the most diehard hermit yearn for company. Of the miserable inconveniences of daily life, she writes, "The
first time I did laundry here, I cried. Secretly. And only after putting eight loads of grimy clothes and fishfouled jeans
through the same marinade of mild sloshing in a wringer washer that only partially worked ... I knew only two basic
categories [before] then: clean and dirty, black and white. [This] seemed a horrible perversion of both the symbol and
reality of laundering." The only parts of this memoir that readers may question involve cameo appearances by Duncan,
Fields's workaholic, emotionally distant husband, who ushers her back to the skiff 20 minutes after she has a
miscarriage. Given her gutsy, capable spirit, it's surprising that our intrepid narrator never follows through on her threat
to walk away. Illus. not seen by PW. (Oct. 17)
Forecast: Fans of Linda Greenlaw's The Lobster Chronicles will pick this up.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Surviving the Island of Grace: A Memoir. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 19 Aug. 2002, p. 77. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA90990035&it=r&asid=ee5a3c4a8d18593fe471e1c1e72fd71a.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A90990035
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 8/12
Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the
Oceans They Fish
David Pitt
Booklist.
98.1 (Sept. 1, 2001): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Oceans They Fish. Ed. by Leslie Leyland Fields. Oct. 2001. 368p St.
Martin's/Thomas Dunne, $23.95 (0312277261).
Here are 19 essays, all of them written by men and women who make their living on the water. Some of them are wellknown
writersPeter Mathiessen is here; so is William McCloskeybut many are journeymen, still learning this
particular craft. But they all share one thing: an understanding of what it takes to be a commercial fisherman. Like
Highliners, McCloskey's marvelous 1979 novel about commercial fishing, these true stories concern men and women
forced to face one of life's toughest facts: your way of life is in serious danger. Putting out to sea for these folks isn't
like going to the office, and catching fish (or crabs or urchins or sharks) isn't a hobby. It's putting food on the table, and
in some cases, it's all they know. Although the quality of the prose in these essays may vary, their impact does not: we
gain a deeper understanding of the life of the commercial fisherman. For readers interested in that topic, especially
those who liked The Perfect Storm, it is sure to satisfy.
Pitt, David
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Pitt, David. "Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Oceans They Fish." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2001, p. 23. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA78790539&it=r&asid=e37e8ead24ff8a46aa1d70b3400542c0.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A78790539
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 9/12
Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the
Oceans they Fish. (In review: a mixed bag of fish
stories)
Jerry Fraser
National Fisherman.
82.11 (Mar. 2002): p9.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Diversified Publications
http://www.divcom.com/
Full Text:
Out on the Deep Blue:
Women, Men and
the Oceans they Fish
Leslie Leyland Fields, editor
St. Martin's Press
Hardcover, 352 pages, $24.95
Since the publication of Sebastian Junger's hugely successful "Perfect Storm," in 1997, there has been a boomlet in
commercial fishing books. This is especially true of disaster accounts like "Lost at Sea," "The Sea's Bitter Harvest,"
and "Coming Back Alive," in all of which there are fewer fishermen around at the end than there are at the beginning.
Nonetheless, most Americans are illinformed on the subject of commercial fishing, though they feel certain that
groundfish are depleted.
Someone once said, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." Indeed. The industry has paid dearly for what
the public doesn't know about commercial fishing. We are portrayed by various constituencies, usually waving the
banners of conservationists or sport fishermen, as overefficient yet wasteful on one hand, industrialized yet primitive
on the other.
But the public has paid a price, too. A few years ago, an artful PR campaign bamboozled Americans into avoiding
swordfish, paving the way for the endless circulation of lists of politically correct fish to eat. Fishery policy wonks
promote the management regime du jour IFQs today, MPAs tomorrow as though they were magic wands, leaving
highlanders to wonder how it is these stupid fishermen don't get it.
So rather than bridle about books that stoke morbid curiosity about a highrisk profession, we need to capitalize on the
public's passing fancy and instill an appreciation of the industry that surpasses sinking boats and drowning men.
Clearly, authors like William McCloskey and Joe Upton have transcended the disasteratsea model of "The Perfect
Storm" and its ilk. But much of their work precedes the wave of interest brought on by Junger's best seller.
"Out on the Deep Blue," an anthology edited by Leslie Leyland Fields, has its shortcomings, but it's good reading and
will acquaint readers with 19 ordinary people who answered the call of the sea by taking, as Seth Harkness would say,
their place in the food chain.
Granted, not all of them hear Herman Melville's words echo every time they look seaward: Joel Gay, one of several
"Deep Blue" essayists who have written for National Fisherman, wants to make a bunch of money during a herring
opening in Togiak, Alaska. "Nothing exceptional. Hundred tons. Maybe 150. The fish have been small all over the
state, which means we could get $600 a ton... First thing, I buy a Stratocaster..."
On the other hand we have Marie Beaver, a wilderness guide who makes a trip on a Kodiak, Alaska, herring seiner to
taste the fishing life with the man she plans to marry. Expecting excitement, she instead finds boredom and seasickness
and no herring. But her love, I think, survives.
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 10/12
Anyone picking up this book will expect to find greenhorn stories, and Fields doesn't disappoint. Michael Crowley,
who today is an editor at NF, captures the spirit of adventurous youth as he recalls his flight from 1968 California to
the deck of a halibut schooner in Alaska's most storied fishery.
McCloskey, wellknown for his books about fishing, is a greenhorn of a different sort: Having served in Alaska in the
Coast Guard as a young man, he comes back, nearing middle age, in search of a site on a fishing vessel. Miraculously,
to hear him tell it, he finds one, and the next year he comes back and gets his son a job, too.
Harkness is a carpenter living on an island in Down East Maine who becomes swept up in the seaurchin gold rush of
the early '90s. There are "so many urchins down there," he hears, "first thing you have to clear a place for your knees."
What distinguishes him from many greenhorns is that he soon is on his own.
We glimpse the mystical bayous of Louisiana as Rob Fritchey chucks school, then marriage, then the life of a
roustabout to pursue fish and crabs. "Do you know what it is to fish?" a Cajun mentor asks him.
One writer who does hear the echo of Melville's words is Paul Molyneaux, a crewman on the swordfish harpoon boat
Irene and Alton. Melville says young dreamers never spot whales; Molyneaux never spots swords.
<
although well written, doesn't seem to bridge the gap. On the other hand, John Coles does as he relates his pragmatic
switch, many summers ago, from commercial to charter boat deckhand.
In any event, the essays of the book's lesserknown authors (I wish Fields told us more about them. Are they still
fishing? Still writing?) hold their own with those of Matthiessen, Coles, Linda Greenlaw and Spike Walker, who are
among its "celebrity" authors.
Most important, however, is that out of this collection emerges <>
Fraser, Jerry
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Fraser, Jerry. "Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Oceans they Fish. (In review: a mixed bag of fish stories)."
National Fisherman, Mar. 2002, p. 9. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA83317677&it=r&asid=ada6ac8a8627eced5467fca27682666e.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A83317677
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 11/12
Out on the Deep Blue
Kirkus Reviews.
69.14 (July 15, 2001): p996.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Out on the Deep Blue." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2001, p. 996. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA35147775&it=r&asid=a325ed34e0821c50697f7c1d7b019667.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A35147775
4/1/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491086704996 12/12
Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding
Freedom from Hurt and Hate
Publishers Weekly.
260.50 (Dec. 9, 2013): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding Freedom from Hurt and Hate
Leslie Leyland Fields and Jill Hubbard. Thomas Nelson/W Publishing Group, $15.99 trade paper (236p) ISBN 9780
849964725
Drawing from their own difficult stories, writer Fields (Surprise Child) and clinical psychologist Hubbard exhibit grace
and genuine empathy in taking on a topic that often takes a lifetime to work through. Fields talks about the power of
confessing the wrongs children suffer from their parents and urges readers to consider the story of the Good Samaritan;
not only are they victims, but also Samaritans, who can use their own pain as a source of empathy. With that
perspective comes the realization that, "Most of all, revenge is an attempt to ease our pain ..." Freedom instead comes
through letting go of expectation, using healthy boundaries, and returning the power of judgment to God. In the
process, those who have been hurt become people of honor, capable of honoring parents and also changing the family
story. The authors' gracious approach does not minimize the pain adults feel about their relationships with parents who
have hurt them. Neither does it offer platitudes. Instead, the Fields and Hubbard outline concrete steps to do the
necessary work of forgiveness in order to move forward into a life of freedom. An excellent resource for the journey.
(Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers: Finding Freedom from Hurt and Hate." Publishers Weekly, 9 Dec. 2013, p. 66.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA354182848&it=r&asid=3b7adb8e4001c4b47adf2a5585991ffe.
Accessed 1 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A354182848
Book Review: Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers
posted on MAY 5, 2014 ·
I chose to read Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers by Leslie Leyland Fields because I loved her other book: Parenting Is Your Highest Calling and 8 Other Myths That Trap Us in Worry and Guilt. I like her approach, the way she brings Bible stories to life in order to help us accurately apply their truths to our lives. I was curious to see what insights she had to share about forgiving others. I found great value in what she had to say. And, though she’s specifically writing about forgiving parents who’ve hurt or neglected their children, her wisdom is applicable to any relationship requiring forgiveness: grandparents, children, siblings, friends.
Along with Bible stories (which include Jonah, The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, and Joseph), Fields shares her own journey toward forgiving her neglectful father and the experiences of other people she’s met along the way. Some learned to forgive and grew through it; others refused to forgive and suffered for that choice. Fields gently helps readers understand why. Each chapter of the book closes with an afterword by Dr. Jill Hubbard who adds her thoughts to Fields’s. Study questions help readers dig more deeply into both the text and God’s Word.
On page 189, Fields says, “We began this journey to ease our burdens, to set ourselves free, yet along the way we discovered even greater freedoms: the freedom to love the unlovely, to risk hurt and betrayal by others, and to forgive, seventy times seven . . . Forgiveness, in its fullest state, leads us to love . . .The more we forgive, the less offense we take from others, the less we need to forgive. We become people of peace.” If holding a grudge is keeping you from this, I recommend you read this book. I received a complimentary copy in exchange for this honest review.
About Latest Posts
Connections:
Janet Benlien Reeves
Reader, Writer, Runner, Flower Hunter, Child of God, Prince Charming's Wife, Mom Prone to Cheer
Review: Forgiving Our Fathers And Mothers
March 21, 2014 by Michelle Van Loon 0 Comments
I can count on one hand the number of adults I’ve known who have not had to work through some level of hurt, neglect, abuse, or emotional disconnect they’re carrying with them from childhood. Even the most well-intentioned, fully-present parents don’t always get it right with their kids. (Hand raised.) However, the notion of children forgiving mothers and fathers whose issues suffocated their ability to parent those children responsibly may seem both excruciating and foolish. Unforgiveness can seem to function as a form of protection for children wounded by their parents.
Leslie Leyland Fields understands the temptation for an adult child to hide within this shield. In her book Forgiving Our Fathers And Mothers: Finding Freedom From Hurt And Hate (Worthy, 2014)*, she writes:
…I kept hearing the commandment, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ (Exodus 20:12). And I wondered as I thought about my apathetic father, How do I honor this man? The questions came as a deep puzzle to me, as it did to all my siblings. But I was not so cut off in my hurt I did not know how many others were in the same dilemma. So many other daughters and sons, regardless of age: middle-aged adults, young adults, teens. Does ‘Honor your father’ apply to us, I questioned, those of us who have been hurt and deceived and abandoned by our mothers or fathers, or even both? Surely if they are dishonorable, we need not honor them! We’re off the hook. Neither did I care to forgive my father and all that had been done in the rooms and houses of my childhood where he sometimes sat and walked – and walked away from.
Fields tells the story of seeking to reconcile her relationship with a father who had abused, neglected, then abandoned his family years earlier – for her own sake, and, eventually, even for her dying father’s sake. Though he was incapable of reaching out to her, Field was acting in response to another Father who’d pursued her with his forgiveness.
We are a found, forgiven, celebrated people. This is not about our mothers or fathers right now. This is about us. What’s been done for us. Who we really are. The God of Everything has come after us – and whether we’re still in that far country or we’ve turned back, there is only one true home, one real freedom: in our Father’s house. Whether we’ve been in His forgiving embrace yet or not, it is there waiting for us. Where will we find the strength, the courage, to forgive? It is here. We can forgive others because we are forgiven. Of everything.
Nine heart-breaking, healing chapters allow readers to accompany Fields on the complex journey through the process. Make no mistake – this kind of forgiveness is a process. Chapter themes include <
At the conclusion of each chapter, counselor Dr. Jill Hubbard offers thoughtful insights and reflection questions designed to help readers apply the concepts to their own situation. At one point she notes, “Though we describe a process here, and this book follows a certain chronology, it’s important to know there is no prescribed exact order to our healing. Forgiveness often does not follow a nice, predictable path lifting us out of our pain. It can be messy at times, as we circle round and round our same issues. It can take time, depending on the depth of what must be forgiven. Remember that our feelings, all of them, are part of our process and that anger and protest are part of our healing too.”
I know a number of people who’ve simply shelved the pain of their relationships with their parents, choosing to treat those relationships as unchangeable components of earlier chapters of their lives. Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers is an invitation to move beyond that uncomfortable truce with the pain of our past toward greater emotional and spiritual liberty. One of my favorite quotes about forgiveness comes from Dr. Louis Smedes who said “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.” Fields’ wise, honest, accessible book is a wonderful companion on the journey toward the freedom that comes from the process of forgiving. Highly, highly recommended.
*I received a copy of the book from the author, but the price I didn’t pay did not affect my assessment of the book. I would buy this book, and hope you will, too.
Book Review: Hooked! By Jen Finn January 25, 2012
iThat story is part of the new anthology Hooked! True Stories of Alaska’s Commercial Fishermen and Women edited by Leslie Leyland Fields. What I liked most about these stories was the honesty of the writers: Nobody comes across as a know-it-all or preachy, and they freely admit their mistakes — which of course make for good stories. On his first time out as a skipper, Sig Hansen tells the story of dropping two lines of 20 crab pots into 400 fathoms of water that he thought was 120 fathoms because of a double echo off the fathometer (that’s $50,000 worth of pots gone forever). And Mary Jacobs admits that her bitchiness didn’t disappear with maturity.
These are stories about fishing, the good times, bad times and sometimes tragic. I think Hooked! could be helpful reading for the next generation of greenhorns as a reminder that everyone has to start somewhere. We forget this over time, but we’ve all experienced that knot of anticipation in our stomachs and sleepness nights.
On his next trip, Mike remembers being nervous that he’d end up like the greenhorn he had heard was so incompetent that the crew put him the fish hold for a couple hours then sent him to his bunk for the remaining two weeks of his trip (allowed out only to use the head).
As you can probably guess, Mike turned out all right.
You can find Hooked! at Amazon.com or on Leslie Leyland Fields’ website.
‘Hooked’ doesn’t explain why fishermen risk lives, but that’s OK
By Libbie Martin / Book Review Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Mar 18, 2012 (0)
FAIRBANKS - Commercial fishing in Alaska is counted as one of the world’s most dangerous occupations. Practitioners contend with weather, gales and seas whose only purpose seems to be thwarting the fervid desire to catch fish and other marine life. People die, are maimed and lose toes and fingers to frostbite. At the very least, fisherpersons know they will lose at least one person they know to this occupation before they call it quits.
And yet, they still come.
Boats head out every year with new and returning crew; holds are filled with fish and crab of all sorts.
Winds blow, ice builds up, the work piles on harder and harder and people still can’t wait to get out on the seas and throw the nets or traps or other gear needed to grab the catch. What is it about this industry that engenders so much obsession?
In “Hooked,” Leslie Leyland Fields, author of “Surviving the Island of Grace,” has collected 16 stories from these men and women who can’t seem to stay off the water. Going beyond the clichés and stereotypes, behind the cameras of “Deadliest Catch,” she has gathered tales from those who know the obsession firsthand.
From professionals to firsttimers, next generation to first in line, Fields <
Some of the tales — and tellers — are familiar to Alaska readers. Sig Hansen, author of “North by Northwestern,” Joe Upton, author of “Bering Sea Blues,” and Spike Walker are found in the anthology’s pages.
Other tales are familiar, but different, because they are told by different people who attribute different memories, reactions and consequences to the same circumstances.
“Halfway through salmon season John Findley fired me, replacing me with a better- looking, more exciting woman. At that point, I made a vow to some day skipper my own boat with an allwomen crew.” So starts Mary Jacob, in her essay “Woman’s Work.”
She returns to the Invader a few weeks later, after skipper Findley begged her to return because “I haven’t been able to catch a fish since you got off the boat.”
After four years of babies, house-caring and living in isolated Mush Bay, Mary realizes she missed salmon fishing, and asks to take the boat out alone that season.
Findley gave up salmon fishing because of the high competition, but gives Mary permission to take the 29foot boat out with two of her friends. He generously agrees to watch the five kids of all three women “as long as it isn’t for the whole summer.”
Mary and her crew — Mary Relyea, Viki and Jane — take the boat and set out to prove salmon fishing is “woman’s work,” as Findley has sneeringly labeled it.
It involves long, hard days, excruciating labor and too little sleep. Not too different from the work required to raise children.
Mary’s essay isn’t just about relearning an old skill and getting older muscles to adapt to a hard routine. It’s about learning who you are, what kind of a leader you can be and what you shouldn’t be when leading any kind of group. It’s about finding your sense of self again, after losing it to men, children, housework and home schooling. It’s about four women, two of whom are single mothers, learning to work together as a well-oiled machine.
It was the first summer for this all-woman crew, but not the last. Mary spent another 25 years catching herring, salmon and halibut, sometimes with men on the crew but more successfully with all-female crews. “Throughout the year, and in trips to come, I would figure out that it is possible, in fact preferable, to have the company of friends on the boat and to actually enjoy our summers catching fish,” Jacobs writes at the end of the essay. “... Those moments of working in harmony, and the raise in our settlement checks, certainly cooled my strong, smoldering will.”
Toby Sullivan, reporter and commercial fisherman, takes on the Exxon Valdez oil spill in his essay, “Lost Season.” It is, as is typical, filled with loss, grief and anger. He writes of the seeming disorganization of the clean-up effort, the sense of betrayal felt by the hundreds of people affected negatively by the spill and the company’s lack of empathy or even comprehension. But mostly, he puts words to the images many of us saw only through our television screens and to the love-hate relationship most of us have with oil. “The oil was the darkest, most beautiful shade of gleaming black we had ever seen. The surface of any gloveful was usually so smooth, like liquid glass, that you could see your own curving reflection in it. But beneath the reflection the oil had a spooky blackness, a density of opaqueness and heavy viscosity that was like nothing we had ever seen.
Even after being washed through 300 miles of ocean, it remained depthless and black and pure as alien blood, the distilled blood of dinosaurs.”
The spill still affects lives, and it’s a seminal event in the history of Alaska, most especially in the lives of those who lost not just a season but an entire life. “Like all great events, the oil spill created its own weather of effect, perception, memory,” Sullivan writes. “Even now ... I sometimes feel a certain sensuous echo of that lost season.”
All the essays are wellwritten, tightly woven stories of lives and characters that intersect in one particular spot — the endless horizon of the ocean. There’s not a one of the bunch worth skipping.
In fact, they all require reading several times, as each time, you find a different nuance, a different hue, to what you thought you read the first time.
The subtitle, “True Stories of Obsessions, Love, and Death from Alaska’s Commercial Fishermen and Fisherwomen,” gave me hope that maybe, finally, I’d understand why people keep going back. In the end, I realized, it really doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that they do. I have to be content with that.
Libbie Martin is a freelance writer who lives in Fairbanks. She can be reached at martinlibbie@yahoo.com.
Hooked!
Edited by Leslie Leyland Fields
Epicenter Press
2012 $14.95
Parenting Is Your Highest Calling: And 8 Other Myths That Trap Us in Worry and Guilt
Leslie Fields
Published By: WaterBrook Press
Book Category: Non-Fiction, Family & Relationships
Buy From Amazon
Reviewed by Jamie Driggers
We’ve all heard them, those catchphrases that are supposed to make us feel better or encourage us on toward excellence. “Parenting is your highest calling.” “You represent Jesus to your kids.” And they work for a while. Right up until your baby pours grape juice on your mother-in-law’s white carpeting while your preschooler smarts off to you and you LOSE IT. AGAIN. Parenting is hard. Darn hard. And no one person has the perfect solution to every parenting problem, no matter the letters after their name that signify their brilliance. So why do we continue to subject ourselves to the methods and catchphrases that leave us more guilty than we started?
In Parenting Is Your Highest Calling, Leslie Leyland Fields walks us through eight of the myths that, as the title says, trap us in worry and guilt. What are these monsters? Why do we believe them? And, is there anything that can be done to be rid of the pressure of unrealistic expectations that they keep us under?
This book has been absolutely liberating. I’ve spent more years than I’d like to admit trying to be the parent I think I’m expected to be, and failing, because it isn’t who I was created to be. People can throw pretty words together, drop in the words “calling,” “God,” or “Jesus” and sound convincing. But Leslie dissects the pretty words and really gets to the heart of the matter. When we buy into the myths, we elevate ourselves or our children to a status belonging to God alone. This book has freed me up to put God back in his proper place and feel confident enough in my parenting to just be. Not to give up. Not to give in. But to be the parent I was meant to be without all the added stresses of methods and catchphrases. Thank you, Leslie. Thank you.
Armchair Interviews says: This is an excellent resource for the parent who is tired of the pre-prescribed parenting mold.
Author’s Web site: http://www.Leslie-Leyland-Fields.com