With a seat-of-the-pants writing approach, Alaska author delivers a propulsive political thriller

Gerri Brightwell is what her students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ English Department call a “pantser.”The Alaska author finds it very difficult to plot out a novel, instead opting for a seat-of-the-pants approach.

Robbie keeps the fossil when the three continue to Glennallen, where it adheres to his hand and a fungus begins spreading across his body at an alarming rate. Despite a medical crisis, they can’t return to the city. And even in tiny Glennallen, someone is after them. It only gets worse for everyone from there.“I wanted whatever I had to have an edge of horror and nastiness to it,” Brightwell said, when discussing why she settled on the fungus that infects Robbie and others.

“I thought, something that’s kind of hidden to people is that a lot of Americans, when they think of immigrants, they think of people who are coming up from Latin America, and not thinking about someone from Britain or Canada,” Brightwell, originally from England, explained. And while many assume she has nothing to fear, when the system clamps down on immigrants, “everyone’s caught up in the same net. It can happen to someone from Canada as well.

Brightwell didn’t set out to be an immigrant or an Alaskan. She came first came north in 1991 to pursue her MFA at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’d contacted several schools, and in those pre-email days received brochures from all but one. Frank Soos, in the UAF English department, sent her a two-page, single-spaced letter. And after a further exchange, where they discussed living in Fairbanks, “I thought, this seems very possible,” she said.

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