Bear Down, Bear North

In this sharply-crafted debut collection, Moustakis invites readers into a world filled with gruff characters, breathtaking wilderness, and a fierceness of spirit as crisp as the Alaskan winter . . . The gifted Moustakis' attention to detail and blunt, sharp prose will surely resonate with readers and fellow writers alike.

The Kenai is the lifeblood that flows through Moustakis’ arrestingly concise, subtly poetic, and piercing short stories about several generations of an extended family.

Moustakis allows readers to fully witness how experience—from a poverty that necessitates scavenging through the belongings of the dead to a younger sister’s beating—can shape lives without creating eternal victims. Burdens become gritty, matter-of-fact reminders that profound emotions often lie behind even the most unflinching exteriors. A welcome tribute to working class lives, Bear Down, Bear North is a debut of impressive voices in the wilderness.

Melinda Moustakis’ stunning debut book, Bear Down, Bear North . . . is a muscular and lyrical short story collection of moxie and love of the land set in her home state of Alaska. Moustakis’ stories are built out of short vignettes, revolving around rough childhoods, fishing, hunting, drinking and regretting, all part of the saga of several generations of a homesteading family.

Moustakis crafts memorable characters with the raunchy dialogue of those who must grow up fast in the wilderness—'bear down'—or slink off to 'the lower 48 in places like Nashville and Omaha.'

Using a series of quick micro-chapters — an approach sometimes called 'modular fiction' — Moustakis jumps between past and present in collages of verbal snapshots that crowd upon each other to create an indelible mood and characters as focused and real as those in John Steinbeck's novels.

Bear Down, Bear North plunges its reader deep into tangled relations and beautiful places. This small craft of 13 linked stories holds everything necessary to survive the frigid Alaskan waters. . . . Melinda Moustakis works words attentively and playfully, slipping like a skater among her subjects, whether describing frenzied salmon spawning in the Kenai River or rowdy children rescuing a bird from a privy.

Bear Down, Bear North is a beautiful collection of interlinked short stories, showing landscapes as ruggedly sparse as the often bleak but still lyrical prose, where people eat unspecified tins or starve until the next moose wanders past their door, and the secret world of fishing becomes poetry in motion . . . You can feel Moustakis’ knowledge and love for her state emitting from every well chosen word. I cannot wait to read more of what she produces; this is one writer worth watching.