Tongass Voices

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

A Juneau bookstore turns 50 this year. Earlier this month, it was voted one of the nation’s top 10 best independent bookstores by USA Today. 

Olga Sofia Lijó Seráns took over Hearthside Books in 2022, but she got into the book business as a librarian in Juneau nearly two decades ago after arriving from Northern Spain.  

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Olga Sofia Lijó Seráns: I love Waiting for the Weather. Eric Forrer’s memoir. It just has so much information about Alaska without being ponderous. Actually, it’s pretty funny. So it’s a great way to just have a very good look at Alaska without thinking that you are studying on it. 

My name is long. It’s Olga Sophia Lijó Seráns, and I am the owner of Hearthside Books and Toys. I was approached about buying Hearthside Books around three years ago, about this time of the year, by somebody else who thought that I could be a good match, because Hearthside  had been for sale for a while, and well, nobody in this town wanted it to close. 

I’m not sure why people thought about me. I have my guesses. I’m a book person. I’ve been always very active in the community. Since I arrived in Juneau in 2007, I got my master’s in library science. I already had two degrees in similar subjects, and then I became a public librarian, and then I became librarian for the Legislative Affairs agency. 

So between that and the fact that I’m always around books, I guess it was not very strange that somebody would have thought about me. 

What brought me to Juneau in the first place was love. My then love interest invited me for a holiday in 2006 and that was it. He was definitely a love interest, but Juneau just closed the deal. 

The big surprise was bestsellers and having to be on top of those changes almost daily. So it makes it a little bit terrifying, because you’re always having to be thinking about what’s coming next and what’s going to be people’s next interest. But on the other hand, it’s also exhilarating, a lot of fun. Will that set of books that were really, really hot two weeks ago arrive in time for being still of interest when they get here?

Hearthside is turning 50 on September 19. It was open in September 19, 1975. So I wasn’t thinking about what that would mean when I initially bought the store. But it has become more and more obvious that people in Juneau consider Hearthside a legacy. 

When you have three generations of the same family coming to you and saying, “You know, my mom used to bring me to Hearthside as a kid, and now I’m bringing my own kids here too.” It kind of makes you realize how important an independent bookstore is still in a community like Juneau. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

The Alaska State Museum in Juneau houses a collection of tens of thousands of objects, from canoes and plants to the state’s last publicly accessible theater organ. But how do you maintain all of those items? That’s conservator Ellen Carrlee’s job.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ellen Carrlee: I could actually talk about what’s in this lab for hours on end. As we go past here, I’ve got these pH strips. They measure the alkalinity or acidity of surfaces. You just get these damp and you press it gently to the surface, and in that way, we’re able to understand if we’ve got crizzling on the beads, which is a deterioration phenomenon. So we’ve been sharing and teaching that technique to our study group.

I’m Ellen Carrlee. I’m the conservator here at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, and my job at the museum is to know what everything is made out of, and how it deteriorates over time, and how to make it last for as many generations as I can.

Conservator, like a museum conservator, is a strange profession that people don’t find themselves familiar with. I think there might be a grand total of five people in all of Alaska who have that job, and it’s really a combination of art and science.

So my training background is in chemistry, art history, studio art, anthropology. Our culture, my culture, my Euro-American culture, does not typically mix art and science, but it is really, for some of us that are built that way, it is a really rewarding career.

Here we are in the Alaska State Museum objects conservation lab. There’s a window into the lab right off the atrium that the eagle tree is in, so you can peek into the lab. And I usually keep a table in front of this window that has, kind of, our latest greatest projects and collaboration.

Right now, the window into the lab has some of our bead study group collaboration. We’re doing a survey of the glass beadwork in the collection, and monthly study groups with beaders and culture bearers about what the beaded items are and how to preserve them. And probably in the coming years, we’ll have a bead exhibit that might hopefully be co-curated by some of those participants.

So if we’re going to make things last for future generations, we have to know how they’re deteriorating and what our role in having them deteriorate is.

For example, up until very recently, until I had a bead worker as an intern a couple years ago, I didn’t realize that glass beads could fade, and particularly pinks and purples fade. So our previous advice had been that glass colorants are very stable, and if you put them on exhibit, you don’t have to worry too much about the light levels.

But now we know if you put glass beads on exhibit, particularly if they have pinks and purples from a certain historical period, you better be careful about the light levels, because you could fade those pinks and purples, and then what the artist had intended things to look like won’t be as obvious.

Museums know about certain kinds of deterioration mechanisms with glass, but bead artists know things that museums don’t about what’s going wrong with beads, and contemporary beads, like certain beads, have coatings and dyes and they could fade.

That’s what we have up in the window there. We have some beads hanging in the window for trying to make them fade on purpose, and we have little vials of solvents to kind of show how some of the beads are not as stable as we might think glass might be. So we’re learning that from the beaders and the bead workers.

On this table, we’ve got a couple different kinds of microscopes. We’ve got another kind of binocular microscope to look at the beadwork up close. For example, on those moccasins there, you’ll see that there’s flowers on the vamps, the kind of the toe part of the moccasin, and on the petals, there’s a certain element that’s kind of a grayish bead.

That grayish bead should be super sparkly and bright. So having it look grayish is really changing the artist’s intent of what that flower should be like. If you look at it under the microscope, you’ll see the hole in that glass bead is actually a square where the thread passes through, and it should be mirrored on the inside.

If you look at contemporary glass beads that have that square hole, they’re really sparkly. And so something has happened to those beads to make them not be sparkly. And you can really see that by looking through the microscope.

So it used to be in museums that the museum staff was the authority. You know, we went to school, we had these elaborate degrees, and we would be the deciders and the authority.

And nowadays that’s changing, and it’s changing fast, and I think the Alaska State Museum is doing a good job at realizing that all of us are smarter than any of us, and these collections belong to Alaskans, and there are experts in the Alaskan community who know a lot more than we do about these materials.

So bringing in the culture bearers, the materials experts, the artists, the folks to whom these collections matter the most, and collaboratively, together, looking at museum collections and deciding how best to care for them for the future is kind of the wave of the future.

 

Correction: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Carrlee’s name. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Tessa Hulls has worked a lot of jobs, biked a lot of miles, and lived a few different lives in and outside of Alaska. A part of her was running from something.

But she spent the last decade turning to face it by writing a graphic memoir about her family’s history. The memoir is called Feeding Ghosts, and it’s won three national awards.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tessa Hulls: I have always been somebody who wrote. You know, I was one of those kids where, from the age I could shove a crayon up my nose, it was clear I was going to be a writer and an artist. And there’s not any route I could have taken that would have allowed me to escape that. 

My name is Tessa Hulls. I am an artist, writer and adventurer who drew and wrote the graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts. 

And yeah, my grandmother, Sun Yi, she was a journalist in Shanghai during the communist takeover, and she ended up on the wrong side of political history, so she was labeled a dissident and was arrested and put through Maoist era thought reform. And for her, writing was the way in which she tried to assert her own reality, even as she watched the government take over and deny everything that was happening.

And it was something that was both her liberation, but also ultimately what broke her mind, because after she and my mom fled China as political refugees, they went to Hong Kong, and my grandma wrote a memoir about eight years of living under the communist regime, and then, unfortunately, had a mental breakdown, and she never really regained her sanity, and she spent the rest of her life trying to rewrite the story that had been taken from her.

Yeah, well, I think when I first started the book, I was really determined to not talk about any feelings. It was just going to be about history. I was not going to be a character in it. And once I was able to commission a translation of my grandmother’s memoir, because it was written in Chinese and never translated into English. So when I opened it and finally read her book, it was kind of the first time that I ever heard her voice, because even though I grew up with her and my nuclear family, we had a language barrier, and she was also heavily medicated on antipsychotics. 

So when I started reading this book that she had written as a political refugee in her 20s, I just immediately went “Oh no,” because I knew suddenly the scope of what I was trying to do had become infinitely more complicated, and the book was going to have to contend with the question of, ‘what is truth?’ when you’re working with both an unreliable mind and a government that is dismantling reality all around you. 

I didn’t feel like I had a choice. My family ghosts literally told me I had to do this. 

So I would spend full summers working in Alaska, and then would freelance as an artist and writer in Seattle in fall and winter, and then spend two months alone on a solo bikepacking trip.

And I was doing it in a way that felt really authentic to what I needed, but I also was well aware that I was running from something. 

And so I was on one of these bike trips kind of realizing that this chapter of my life where I was just hoarding my own wonder had come to an end and that I needed to step into a different kind of responsibility. 

 And so I was biking alone up a mountain and so I said, “Okay, if this chapter is done, what comes next?” And the landscape opened up and spoke to me and said, “Someone has to feed the ghosts.” And my book is called Feeding Ghosts, because that was the beginning of this nine year process of really stepping into something that was my family duty. 

And as I got towards the end of the story, you kind of get contemplative about,” Well, what did I learn, really, along the way?” And I think the process of drawing and writing this book was really me learning how to render both my mother and my grandmother in two complex, three dimensional characters. And in order to do that, I had to draw them from every angle.

And I wrote about my grandmother saying that it’s much easier to call someone crazy than it is to contend with how deeply they’ve been injured by the past. 

And I think a lot of the things that we put the umbrella category of trauma on are really just instead coming from a refusal to look at the depth of rupture, and therefore the amount of work it would require for there to be genuine repair.

So the places where there weren’t clear answers, I forced that uncertainty on my reader and said, look, it’s kind of a choose your own adventure here, because there’s no way to actually discern what actually happened, and here are the competing narratives. And I leave it up to you to decide what path to take through it.

You can find Feeding Ghosts at Alaska Robotics, where Hulls will launch the paperback version with a party on May 6 at 5:30 p.m. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Justin Smith of Gustavus has produced albums for Alaska artists like Annie Bartholomew, Blackwater Railroad Company and Josh Fortenbery.

He’s performed at festivals with blues legends like B.B. King, James Brown, Son Seals and Taj Mahal, but Smith says he loves playing and producing for Alaskans more than anything.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Justin Smith: There’s this whole sort of instrumental bridge section in a tune called “Happy Tune” on the Blackwater Railroad record where it’s just musically so exciting. And I was just sitting there hearing them play it, you know, and looking over at the computer and seeing, like, “Yes, it’s recording. We’re getting this, yeah!” You know? 

Dec. 1 of 93, I spent my last dollar at Heritage Coffee. Got off the ferry. We were like, pulling change out from under the seat, you know, of the car, trying to get enough money together for our ferry tickets. 

And I had $1 left when I got to Juneau. Walked around, it was First Friday in December. We walked out of the galleries eating all the cookies because we didn’t have any food. That was my start in Juneau. And I got here, and everybody told me I needed to go to the Alaskan (Hotel) on Thursday night for the open mic. So I did that on my first Thursday. 

And I was always the guy in the high school bands and stuff that would set up the PA and figured those things out, and I would mess around with a four-track recorder, things like that. So I had kind of an inclination towards the gear side of things, but eventually I wanted to record myself. 

I got a little bit of gear, and then I just kind of branched out from there, because I heard somebody singing once at open mic and invited them over to record their stuff. And I just, I just love it, you know? I just love it. 

And I tried to acquire nice gear and learn the best methods, because I didn’t want anything to sound amateur, and I didn’t want to put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into getting a performance, and then feel like if I ever wanted to put it out on a record, I’d have to re record it in a real studio, you know, because it’s just so hard to get that performance and get that thing that you want, and to think that you’re only doing it temporarily, until you can do it for real in a real music studio. So I tried to start with nice equipment and doing it the right way. 

When we did Annie’s record, when we did Sisters of White Chapel, we did that in a cabin at the Methodist camp. One of my favorite things on that was, at the end of “Last Confession,” there’s this long piano outro, and we recorded the band with Kat (Moore) playing bass, and then we came up with this arrangement idea to like, give it to the piano to reprise the melody at the end of it. 

Kat sat at the piano and was trying to pick out the melody, and she played a few wrong notes while she was trying to figure out the melody. She’s okay, “I think I got it. Let’s do this.” And we recorded it once, and I was like, “Could you play it the way that you did, like a few minutes ago, and you’re still trying to figure out the melody, and it wasn’t quite exactly right?” And she sort of got back to that space, and that’s what’s on there. And it’s just so beautiful.

Because the concept of it is like, there aren’t — of the record, you know  — there weren’t concert musicians in the Yukon, you know, in the 1860s right? And so it was meant to seem a little ragged and a little sort of amateur. And it’s just such a beautiful moment when we all put that together and listen back to it, we were all so floored. It was so great. 

What I love about music, and what I love about Alaska, it’s all the same. It’s beauty, you know. And there’s so much beauty in these things. And I want it around me. I want music around me all the time, and I want Alaska around me, and wildlife and just the beauty of the environment here and the beautiful, amazing people. I want all of that around me all the time in my life. So that’s why I want to be here, you know? 

And there’s so much support for music here and all of the arts. And Alaskan artists, I found with these productions that I’ve done, are passionate about doing their work in Alaska. They often see it as like a little bit of a cop-out to go down to Seattle or LA or something and buy some studio time to record their music that they’ve come up with up here. They want to do it in Alaska with Alaskans and that’s so cool, because we have it all here.

Here’s Justin Smith performing a Red Carpet Concert in 2019. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

A retired couple in Juneau has picked up an interesting hobby — researching true crime stories in Southeast Alaska’s history. Betsy Longenbaugh and Ed Schoenfeld host walking tours and talks, and Longenbaugh has turned the research into two books, with another in progress.

Her first work of fiction, Death in the Underworld, is based on a crime committed in Douglas in 1916. And they have two upcoming presentations — called Death with Dessert — in April and May. 

Betsy Longenbaugh: Our daughter, when we talked about Alaska’s first serial killer, made a cheesecake with a cereal crust. So she’s very deliberate about choosing, choosing the desserts and tailoring them to our presentation.

Ed Schoenfeld: We had a story about dismemberment and dismemberment, and she created a dismembered lemon meringue pie.

Betsy Longenbaugh: I’m Betsy Longenbaugh.

Ed Schoenfeld: I’m Ed Schoenfeld.

Betsy Longenbaugh: Well, both of us retired. We’ve been retired now for somewhere between six and seven years, and our passion after we retired, very unexpectedly, became looking into historic murders in not just Juneau, but some of the other communities in Southeast Alaska.

Ed Schoenfeld: And we call our effort True Crime Alaska, because everybody needs to be branded, right? And we research historic true crime. And it’s not just to do blood and guts, you know, like so much of the true crime reporting is these days, but we really like to talk about what’s going on in the community, and it really gives you a window into a community at a different point of time. I mean, Juneau in 1904 or, you know, Tenakee in the 1930s.

Betsy Longenbaugh: 1906, to be precise.

Ed Schoenfeld: And beyond that, it also just gives us a chance to talk about not only the particular cases, but how the justice system worked, how the community responded to times of crisis, which, in a small town, a murder generally, is a crisis.

And also to examine how the judicial system, the police, etc, responded to crimes against women and people of color, because obviously there was a lot of discrimination in those days.

Betsy Longenbaugh: But also how the media covered it. I mean, one of the things that have been interesting and frustrating is when we do our research, we know that there are Alaska Native women and men being killed. There’s very little coverage about them in the newspapers. There might be an account that it happened. But often it’s not much more than a name or two and maybe a charge.

In my second non fiction book, I just wrote a piece about a murder that happened in Petersburg, it was a horrible murder. It was a woman and child, and you would think it would have been a very sensational story that got a lot of coverage, but they were Chinese and their killer was Japanese, and they were all cannery workers. So there was actually very little coverage about the crime itself, even in Petersburg, where it happened.

Because we rely so heavily on newspapers as a resource for research, it’s upsetting and a little frustrating when the newspaper turns a blind eye to really these terrible things that are happening and we can’t get a handle on it.

We’re basically dealing with stories that don’t involve it, involve any live witnesses in all. But one case, the new book is going to have a story that happened in Sitka in the late 1950s and I actually was able to talk to two witnesses to that case, simply because I grew up in Sitka. So I was able to sort of track down these old timers, one of a former nurse who just turned 100 and was sharp as a tack and really helpful in the story.

So not having people who were there, having to rely on all third hand resources, so not having live witnesses, and then trying to figure out bits and pieces of clues. I had a story that I just wrote about a killing down in Ketchikan, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on it, until I contacted my source in Alcatraz. I have a guy I worked with named Gregory Schmidt, who works for the archives down in San Francisco, and he sends me these amazing resources from Alcatraz.

And when he sent that, I realized that most likely this man had not actually done the crime, based on what happened during his parole hearings and his behavior in prison, where he spent most of the rest of his life.

Finding those little bits and pieces, and sometimes big bits and pieces, is really the fun part. Again, it’s the puzzle, right? It’s figuring out.

Ed Schoenfeld: And sometimes we just have a feeling that there’s something missing that maybe we can find if we dig deeper. And it’s the same as when you’re reporting, you think you have the story, but you’ve done enough of this to think there’s something else going on here we should know about.

And sometimes we, pretty much, you know, decide not, not to include something in a book or presentation, because we’re just not sure. Usually we’re able to figure it out one way or the other.

Betsy Longenbaugh: We’ve been very clear about drawing the line at statehood, because when we initially did this work, not the writing, but the walking tours, we included some cases that Ed had covered as a reporter and that I was familiar with. And it became too traumatic, not just for us, but for the people who were hearing the stories.

I remember walking to her where we were talking about a contemporary murder was not, I don’t know, 25-30 years ago, but one of the people on the tour had taught the defendant in grade school. And another tour, we’d had somebody who’d served on the jury.

And I’m from a little town, you know? I’m from Sitka and I know how these things haunt communities. They really haunt communities. And we didn’t want to be participating in that haunting.

We wanted to be able to talk about stories where, as I like to put it, everybody would be dead anyway. Because it takes away that immediacy and the trauma, and I think the trauma and sadness of the murder, which are always just really heartbreaking, is balanced by telling more about their story and Ed likes to think of it as bringing names to the fore that have been long forgotten. The first book is Forgotten Murders. And it’s not just forgotten murders, in my mind, it’s forgotten victims.

Ed Schoenfeld: And the other way we kind of balance out this horrible stuff is we talk a lot about the history of the community and just of trends.

Betsy Longenbaugh: It’s actually the first fiction I’ve ever written. It’s based on a historic case that happened in Douglas in the early 1900s but I found that case very difficult to look into. It’s a very upsetting case in so many ways, and so when I fictionalized it, I found it, I was able to come up with a much more satisfying end.

And also explore some of the pieces of that story that we discovered when we were doing research on the original piece, which is that the victim was part of a sex trade operation that operated in Buenos Aires between the 1870s and World War Two. It was very well known, and their books about it, and this woman happened to have been part of that and was killed by her procurer, and who they were unable to convict.

So in my story, there’s a lot more twists and turns, but it’s sort of based generally around this historic crime.

Ed Schoenfeld: And there’s as much research that went into this, I think, just plus the imagination, and Betsy is a wonderful writer. But you know, if we wanted to find out, well, how much beer cost, because there’s bar scenes, not sure if we use that, but.

Betsy Longenbaugh: Well, I found out a lot about too about how federal marshals worked and coroner’s juries, which I’d been learning more about, but to write about those in a fictional piece was just different. So I really, really, really enjoyed writing it. It was just really super fun, because I was able to, I think, create some strong female characters.

So this the story, as it turns out, sort of centers around these very strong women who are trying to protect themselves from a ruthless killer who’s already killed one of their friends, and sort of how they protect themselves and the world of Juneau at the time of 1916.

You can find information about their talks and books at truecrimealaska.com. 

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

Juneau’s State Office Building is home to the state’s only publicly available theater organ, and its fate is in question. The Kimball organ has been around for nearly 100 years, and it’s been part of the Alaska State Museum’s collection since the 1970s.

But now, the organ is approaching the end of its usable life. Rebuilding it would cost upwards of $250,000 and require shipping it to Portland, Oregon for a year.

Father and son Jonas and Chris Nordwall came to Juneau from Portland to take a look at the inner workings of the organ. In this episode of Tongass Voices, they talk about what’s needed to keep it going.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Chris Nordwall: I have a feeling those are all feather touch, right there. That one I already took down, go to the next note. Down. No, no, slowly. How quickly is it contacting?

Jonas Nordwall: Feather touch.

Chris Nordwall: All right.

My name is Chris Nordwall, and I am co-owner of Rose City Organ Builders in Portland, Oregon.

We came up to Juneau to tune the organ at the State Office Building, repair what we could in short order, and get it ready for what was the Friday afternoon lunch concert, and also then have the sit down discussion in the Q&A forum that was just held to find out what the fate of the instrument will be.

Jonas Nordwall: I’m Jonas Nordwall. I’m from Portland, Oregon, and currently I’m technically retired, but I’m at First United Methodist Church as the artistic music director, and I’ve been there 54 years.

I was approached by my son, who is a co-owner of Rose City Organ Builders, about coming up here to have a meeting with people at the museum about their Kimball pipe organ, and its possible future.

It was an opportunity to come up and see what’s going on and what the thoughts of the community are, because that’s the important thing. It’s not what the outsiders want to recommend. It’s what’s going to be the best results for your local community.

Chris Nordwall: This is a challenge, because you’re coming in and trying to diagnose something that isn’t original per se. Parts of it are, parts of it have been updated. I mean, that’s always the feel good thing at the end of the day, if you’ve actually nailed something down that you know has been an ongoing thing.

You’ll do what you have to do to get that note to function the way it should. It may not be the prettiest repair, but if it works for the performance, that’s what you’re going for. And I think that’s, what this thing has seen over the last 30 years. It’s had, the immediate needed maintenance to get it through the next day. And it’s kind of hit the brick wall. 

So the other thing you have to be really careful about is you can’t start going too deep with this, because it’s like a Pandora’s box. You might be able to repair that you might cause 10 other problems in the process. 

Every project that we’ve undertaken always has its own challenges, and there’s a lot of gnashing of teeth, there’s blood, sweat and tears, but the final product, when you hear it make music for the first time, is always thrilling, and when you see people enjoying it again as they remember hearing it and whatnot. It’s, it gives you a lot of momentum to keep going in an otherwise very small, niche market.

I hope it’s still around. I hope that it’s something that we’ll see a resurgence. Everything has to die off. Hopefully it won’t completely die off, but I hope to see that it’ll sort of have its rebirth in the not too distant future.