Gaining Daylight

Winner, Creative Nonfiction WILLA Literary Award

Loewen's essays are exquisite slices of life . . . this solemn, spare book is an intimate and loving look at a life that very few people live.'  starred review, Publishers Weekly

With quiet grace, Lowen writes of her children, marriage, and home and her place within it. More pragmatic than romantic, this is what life in Alaska is really about. Booklist

[Gaining Daylight] is a wonderful debut that deftly spans Loewen’s own inner and Alaskan geographies with a rare intimacy, elegance, and steadfastness. Like the tides on Uyak Bay, the essays move with a certain rightness and loveliness, a definite rhythm—and so we are moved by them. Simmons B. Buntin, Terrain.org

Here’s to a fresh new northern voice. Sara Loewen’s brilliant collection is like a seafood feast; instead of salmon, cod, and seaweed salad, we’re treated to stories of growing up in the freedom of a Kodiak Island village, summers at a remote fishing site, mothering boys at the edge of the sea, and various historical events that shaped life on the islands Loewen knows as home. Loewen’s writing is smart, honest, and gorgeously lyrical. Like fish scales stuck to rubber boots, these stories will last as reminders of the importance of place, family, and all that anchors us. Nancy Lord, former Alaska Writer Laureate and author of Fishcamp, Beluga Days, and Early Warming

Reading Sara Loewen’s memoir, Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands, you will learn a lot about Kodiak, Alaska, past and present, but mostly, you will be spending time with a bright, funny, observant, lifelong Alaskan, a young mother married to a fisherman. Sara has a story to tell, and she does it so well you won’t realize until you are done with Gaining Daylight how much she has taught you about living a good life, no matter which island you call home. Heather Lende, author of Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs and If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name

These essays are about what’s universal in human experience: friendship, marriage, community, questions of one’s place and purpose in life, how raising children alters a woman’s sense of identity. At the same time, they depict the possibility of an expanded identity in a place where a family works together to make a living from the sea. Her powerful yet quiet, humble and eloquent voice guides a reader, whether it be an Alaskan reader, or a reader in New York City, through a foreign landscape into familiar inner terrain. Eva Sau litis, author of Leaving Resurrection, Many Ways to Say It, and Into Great Silence