On the Ice
An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
by Gretchen Legler
Negative 120 degree weather. Canned food that dates back at least a
decade. Wind storms powerful enough to lift a human off the ground.
Extremely unfashionable clothing. Welcome to Antarctica, the farthest
away place in the world.
When Gretchen Legler was a girl, she dreamed about traveling to two
places: the moon and Antarctica. She hasn’t gotten to the moon yet, but
she did spend a full season in Antarctica, and On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica is her account of her time spent on the icy continent.
The recipient of a grant from the National Science Foundation’s
Artists and Writers Program, Legler was spurred to go to Antarctica
when her life reached a crossroads: she had recently suffered through a
divorce, come out as a lesbian, and had her first (disastrous)
relationship with a woman. Hoping to get away from the complexities of
her life, she arrived at McMurdo Station with the intention of
researching the landscape; what she found, instead, was a zany
population of people—and a thriving lesbian community.
Part sociological study, part historiography, and part love story, On the Ice is an exploration of one of the most unexplored places on earth, and the people who are drawn to it.
Gretchen Legler
Author's Bio:Gretchen Legler is the author of All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook.
Legler received her PhD from the University of Minnesota, taught in the
MFA Writing Program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and now
teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Maine at
Farmington. She lives with her partner, Ruth Hill—who she met in
Antarctica—on eighty acres, where they keep goats, make maple syrup,
hunt mushrooms, pick berries, and keep a big vegetable garden.
Quotes:“Legler accomplishes that rarest of all feats in the Antarctic:
transforming an heroic space into a legible place. She does so without
diminishing the continent’s power in our imagination, and leaves the
reader with a profound understanding of what it is to love the sublime
and to love sublimely.”
—William Fox
Terra Antarctica: Looking
Into the Emptiest Continent
“Gretchen Legler weaves a thoughtful, provocative story out of
Antarctica’s unforgiving beauty. In precise, nuanced prose, she
records not only its natural and human histories, its myths, legends,
and old assumptions, but also the complexities of the community she
finds at McMurdo Station, where the extremities of place
indelibly mark the lives of her fellow
travelers, and the desires and dreams in the reaches of her own
heart.”
—Jane Brox
Legacies of the American Farm
“Gretchen Legler chronicles a continent and a love affair in this
poignant, beautiful book. She brings together science and art,
isolation and intimacy in language that frequently moved me to pangs of
recognition and to tears. Having had the privilege of living in
Antarctica, I saw in Legler’s On the Ice both accuracy and poetry in her vivid descriptions of the place and its people.
She gifts us with the ice beneath her feet, the ice our eyes can hardly
fathom, all the way to the edge, where she meets herself to break the
ice within. The greatest adventure, she reminds us, is the one we
take in our own hearts. That her journey is coupled with a place
as literally breathtaking as Antarctica makes this a truly singular
book.”
—Christopher Cokinos,
Antarctic Visiting Writer, 2003-2004
Hope is the Thing with Feathers:
A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds
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Price:
$ 15.95
Binding: Paper
Availability In Stock: 87
Immediately
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2005
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Genre: Nonfiction
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9781571312822
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