Holiday Listen: Alaska Is The Center Of The Universe
If you're got a road trip planned, or it's time to curl up around the fireplace? This series is perfect if you need some downtime
As the year fades out and the noise on the highway go quiet, if you’re looking for a series that will help you to quietly lull into another zone, sit you down, hand you a mug of eggnog, ask nothing of you but your ability to believe.
Get ready to be transported to another time and a faraway place, here’s the perfect holiday listen.
Alaska Is The Center Of The Universe
[James Dommek Jr]: “I was born and raised in Kotzebue, a village of about 3,000 on the Chukchi Sea. I grew up playing basketball and trying to skateboard on the only little patch of pavement at the airport - my dad worked there, he’s a mechanic.
And my mom sewed traditional fur parkies…she’s an amazing skin sewer. She makes hats, fancy parkas, gloves, earrings.
I was raised around fur and tools. I was also raised around stories. Storytelling is in my blood. I’m the great grandson of Palagan, or Paul Munroe, a revered Iñupiat storyteller. My family and my people have been living in this part of the world for over 10,000 years.
And before books. Before TV, the Internet and the endless scroll on your phones, we had someone who would just tell you a story, for a long time.
Since then there’s been a lot of changes that happened really fast. Western contact, colonization and all that came with that. Climate change. But our stories are still here….”
And with that, Dommek Jr sets out on a journey across Alaska to find those stories that he’s lived with his whole life.
He travels from the Arctic Circle all the way down to the rainforests of the Southeastern panhandle.
He finds hunters, elders, spiritual people and the ones who are wary even to share their story. He rides on the back of snow machines, four-wheelers, boats, goes out hunting on the land. He finds people willing to talk in their trucks in their homes, or while they are hunting, and then sits down for a music jam.
Dommek Jr is magic behind a microphone. He gets them to talk…and share their own stories, ripped from myths, legends and mysteries not yet concluded.
The journey of this series is evident in the raw corners of the tape. It’s made to make you feel like you’re driving with him inside that rickety truck, down a bumpy Alaskan road.
This is not a project to discover the fossils of stories now gone. These stories are very much alive…they remain true to this day. They are there to remind us that these stories are very much still alive…the people who tell them and the lore they cover. Even if they are buried inside the memory or the secrets that don’t want to be shared. If these stories can survive millenia, so can we.
[James Dommek Jr]: I like to say that one of the ways we’ve always made sense of things around here is with our stories…and that’s what I’m hoping to do.
James Dommek Jr, Author, Narrator
Issac Kestenbaum and Josephine Holtzman, Producers
Audible Originals
6 Episodes
6 Episodes, 3.1 hours