The original title of these stories was "In the Eye of Solitude," and that title suggests the dominant tone of the pieces. They were written between 1973 and 1998 and their weave and fabric bear the autograph of Irving Warner's life and activities, twenty-one years within the field of fisheries followed by twelve years teaching at a small college in Kodiak, Alaska. These are stories about living in the wild, often alone, sometimes with a small group of others. They tell of people who went to Alaska to escape their lives and who found, instead, that Alaska truly forced them to face the very evils which they'd hoped to leave behind.
    A single man lives and fishes alone until a woman bargains for him to take her young son along; another man moves into a cannery on an island, again alone, and begins re-examining his former life as a drug runner in South America; and yet another explores a remote Aleutian island in search of clues about the disappearance of his son; another goes insane, slowly, from the cold and the solitude. One man teams with an old friend to smuggle valuable falcon eggs from Alaska; another, a priest, finds himself torn between native distrust and his own desire to help resolve what turns out to be a major island crisis; another searches for the truth behind the death of a Russian army corporal nearly one hundred years ago and ends up confronting the truth of his own troubled life.
    Interspersed between these stories are vignettes, short non-fiction pieces which focus on the land and the people--particularly people who "disappear"--in this vast and challenging country.

Irving Warner currently lives on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula where he raises geese, chickens, and rabbits. A former top-level chess player, Irving moved to Alaska in the mid-sixties and went to work for the Alaska Fish and Game Department, traveling to all corners of that vast state studying the wildlife. In 1977 he published his first book of short stories, In the Islands of the Four Mountains, and in 1980 he resigned from fish and game work to earn his master's degree in English at the University of Maine. He returned to teach English at the Kodiak campus of the University of Alaska until his retirement in 1995. A novelist and screenwriter as well as a short story writer, Irving has won an NEA Creative Writing Award as well as an Alaska State Writers' Award. His thirty-two-year-long Alaska residence ended on New Year's Day 1996, when he took early retirement and moved to Washington State. After thirty-three years, as Warner puts it, "my health was shot and resources too meager to survive in the Alaska economy. Yet it had been a phenomenal ride: I arrived in 1963 as a 22-year-old in a beat-up car, and departed as a 55-year-old hobbling along with a cane. When I flew out of Alaska, I looked below at a receding Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska and remembered Yeats' line, 'This is no land for old men.'"

Review from Library Journal (10/1/98) of Irving Warner's book, In Memory of Hawks and Other Stories from Alaska (Pleasure Boat Studio, 1998): "If one were to combine the creative genes of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, the result might just be Warner (English, emeritus, Univ. of Alaska). In this intriguing collection of short stories, he masterfully captures the essence of wild Alaska. Disappearance and death move hand-in-hand across America's last frontier, a place equally noted for its eccentric characters and its scenic magnificence. In "A Journal from the Bay of Islands," a mysterious millionaire takes up residence in an abandoned cannery, with unexpected results. A migration to the far north in "Highway of the Moon" becomes a sobering retreat from life itself. The 16 stories, interspersed with brief commentaries that add vivid color to the whole, make evident a deep connection to the Alaskan experience. Highly recommended for all libraries with strong literary collections."

Jack Olsen, Author of The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, Night of the Grizzlies, and other prizewinning works: "Irving Warner is a rare find. His stories are filled with the subtlety and power of the great American masters--Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw. He has the touch."

Barry Leeds, Author of Mailer's Structured Vision and Ken Kesey: "I've been to Alaska. And having read Irving Warner's In Memory of Hawks, I feel as though I've just returned. These forceful, brooding, evocative pieces remind me of the Alaska of Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? ,of Kesey's Sailor Song, of Dickey's To the White Sea."

Nick Jans, Author of The Last Light Breaking and A Place Beyond: "A taut, mature voice, distinctly Alaskan, authentic in detail. Irving Warner has, with this collection, established himself at the forefront of Alaskan short fiction."

Peggy Shumacher, Poet, Author of Wings Moist from the Other World: "Irv Warner knows the Alaska that tourists never see--the Alaska of herring salteries and fish canneries, the Alaska of scientists alone in the bush for dangerously long field seasons. Warner tells the inside stories of an estranged father searching the Aleutians for his vanished son, and a hawk biologist who turns to doomed exploitation when his project's abruptly canceled. Thirty years in Alaska have shown Warner what happens when solitude turns to isolation, and isolation to destruction. Tucked among brief glimpses of people who have disappeared in Alaska's vastness, Warner's stories focus on what remains beyond our grasp--the mysteries of wildness within and around us."

Ordering Information

Irving Warner
In Memory of Hawks
Pleasure Boat Studio 1998
ISBN 0-91651413-4-9
210 pages | Trade Paper $15.00

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