Ghosts of Distant Trees Book Talk

📅 Friday | March 13th | 4:00 PM

📍 Peregrine Book Company

RSVP your seat for a discussion and book signing.

For readers interested in conservation, land management, and climate change. In Ghosts of Distant Trees, Erica Watson traces the layered ecologies of Denali National Park, Alaska—its vast, shifting landscape, seasonal labor rhythms, and the subtle politics of inhabitation. Through lyric and narrative essays, she explores how built environments like Denali’s single road shape encounters with land, gender, weather, and community. The narrative is centered in Denali National Park, but Arizona also makes appearances throughout the text.

Turning from iconic vistas to gravel, orange peels, and garden beds, Watson asks what it might be like “to get to know a place without immediately thinking of what threatens it.” Haunted by fire and thaw, these essays resist elegy, offering instead a complex meditation on belonging, vulnerability, and the fragile intimacies that persist in a warming world. This is writing attuned to detail, disruption, and the ethics of attention.

Erica Watson grew up primarily in the Southwestern US, in a National Park Service family. While studying poetry, Spanish, and women’s studies at the University of Arizona, she started spending summers doing seasonal work at Denali National Park. She has lived year round on the park’s boundary, on traditional Ahtna lands, since 2010.

She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2014, where she was a recipient of the Jason Wenger Award for Excellence in Writing. Erica was a 2016 Fishtrap Fellow, and a 2022 Storyknife resident. She has received support from the National Park Service, the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and Denali Education Center.

Erica has published essays, articles, and opinion pieces in national and regional Alaska journals, and is at work on her first collection of essays. Click here to see publication history.

Erica’s teaching experience includes generative workshops for writers of all levels, as well as topical classes for intermediate/experienced writers.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Peregrine Book Company, 219 North Cortez Street, Prescott, United States

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