Kendra Langford Shaw moved away from Sitka when she was eight years old, but Southeast Alaska has never left her imagination. This month, the Montana-based city councilmember published her first novel, The Pillager’s Guide to Arctic Pianos. Set in the fictional “Territory of the Arctic” the story follows a family as they search for a relative’s piano from over 200 years ago, while rising sea levels threaten their home as they know it.
“My parents moved up to Alaska in the early 80s… My dad was a music teacher, and one of his first jobs was delivering musical instruments to all these kind of bush schools across Southeast Alaska,” says Langford Shaw. “And one of the first short stories I wrote, I was just kind of playing around [with] ‘What would have happened if his plane had gone down, or like 1000s of these planes had gone down, and there were these instruments that were littered all over, and then people found them and were restoring them, and it became this like whole economic driver?'”
Langford Shaw began writing the story a decade ago when she was in graduate school. With the support of a research grant, she returned to Sitka for the first time since she was a kid to conduct research for the novel. Her eyes sparkle behind bold yellow glasses as she describes key differences she observed in Sitka on her return trip, and how that inspired the setting of her story.
“So in the book, there’s these trees that I call the singing spruce, which I really patterned after a Sitka spruce, and they’re like 300 feet tall in the book, which is definitely the kid version of what trees are now, that most of them don’t actually grow that tall, but that was still very much in my mind,” says Langford Shaw. “Everything is so much bigger and more vibrant [as a kid] than when you see it as an adult, and so that’s still very much in my mind when I think about Sitka.”
Langford Shaw says she set the story in a fictional place in order to not overwrite Alaska Native histories. She says she wanted to imagine a world where Indigenous communities’ land autonomy was respected by settlers. She also hopes that Alaskans are able to see the resiliency and boldness that she admires from them reflected in the story.
“I tried to put it into each of the characters [that] they’re taking chances, they’re doing things that are risky and challenging, and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t work out as well as they want,” says Langford Shaw. “But they’re out engaging with the environment constantly, both because they have to and because they want to.”
While the story deals with challenging themes, like what it means to define home and family in a changing environment, Langford Shaw was inspired by her own family’s ability to use humor to work through problems together.
“If you’re not finding moments of making each other laugh in the midst of even really difficult things, that’s a huge loss,” says Langford Shaw. “I think it’s a better life if you can try and find those moments together.”
Langford-Shaw has been thrilled with the positive reception of her book so far. Last week she hosted a launch reading in her home of Billings, Montana, and will soon host readings across the lower 48 and Alaska, stopping in Sitka this July.
