Tag: Seldovia Publc library

Seldovia Public Library Board of Directors Meeting

Seldovia Public Library Book Club: Alaska’s Daughter by Elizabeth Pinson

October 23, 2025 at 6:30-8PM

Friendly conversation and discussion about this book. Everyone is welcome! We have one copy available for checkout, or purchase your own copy at a 10% discount from the Homer Bookstore. (Be sure to mention it’s for book club.)

Elizabeth B. Pinson shares with us her memories of Alaska’s emergence into a new and modern era, bearing witness to history in the early twentieth century as she recalls it. She draws us into her world as a young girl of mixed ethnicity, with a mother whose Eskimo family had resided on the Seward Peninsula for generations and a father of German heritage. Growing up in and near the tiny village of Teller on the Bering Strait, Elizabeth at the age of six, despite a harrowing, long midwinter sled ride to rescue her, lost both her legs to frostbite when her grandparents, with whom she was spending the winter in their traditional Eskimo home, died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Fitted with artificial legs financed by an eastern benefactor, Elizabeth kept journals of her struggles, triumphs, and adventures, recording her impressions of the changing world around her and experiences with the motley characters she met. These included Roald Amundsen, whose dirigible landed in Teller after crossing the Arctic Circle; the ill-fated 1921 British colonists of Wrangel Island in the Arctic; trading ship captains and crews; prospectors; doomed aviators; and native reindeer herders. Elizabeth moved on to boarding school, marriage, and the state of Washington, where she compiled her records into this memoir and where she lived until her death in 2006.

Book Club (w/ author Marilyn Sigman!) Entangled: People & Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay

We are excited to share that author Marilyn Sigman will be in Seldovia for this Book Club meeting! We will discuss her book, and it’s a great chance for you to ask questions.

We have one copy available for checkout, or purchase your own copy at a 10% discount from the Homer Bookstore. (Be sure to mention it’s for book club.)

Chronicling her quest for wildness and home in Alaska, naturalist Marilyn Sigman writes lyrically about the history of natural abundance and human notions of wealth – from seals and shellfish to sea otters to herring, halibut and salmon – in Alaska’s iconic Kachemak Bay.

Kachemak Bay is a place where people and the living resources they depend on have ebbed and flowed for thousands of years. The forces of the earth are dynamic here: they can change in an instant, shaking the ground beneath your feet or overturning kayaks in a rushing wave. Glaciers have advanced and receded over centuries. The climate, like the ocean, has shifted from warmer to colder and back again in a matter of decades. The ocean food web has been shuffled from bottom to top again and again.

In Entangled, Sigman contemplates the patterns of people staying and leaving, of settlement and displacement, nesting her own journey to Kachemak Bay within diasporas of her Jewish ancestors and of ancient peoples from Asia to the southern coast of Alaska. Along the way she folds in scientific facts about the region as well as the stories told by Alaska’s Indigenous peoples.

4th of July Library Book Sale