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Erica 👻 🌲 📕

@rickirobin.bsky.social

490 followers 370 following 650 posts

Writer, reader, knitter, sometimes organizer. Student of climate & shifting seasons. Contentedly discontent. Ghosts of Distant Trees, Porphyry Press 2025 Denali National Park, AK. Part of my heart lives in the desert. she/her ericarobinwatson.com

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 26d

I am still having a weird time marketing a book right now, but words like Sean’s keep me in it. And preorders really do help, esp with small presses like Porphyry. I’d love for Ghosts to live on your shelf or dread altar or library.

porphyry.press/ghosts-of-di...

“Alaska has drawn many dreamers to its landscapes—Erica Watson among them. In these essays centered around her work in Denali National Park, she interrogates, with incisive criticism and vulnerable storytelling, the reality out from the myth. Hers is a frame that implores us to see the larger systems that have shaped and are shaping this place she now calls home alongside the intimate, sometimes contradictory details that give the park its beauty. These essays explore how climate change, political upheaval, and declining infrastructure connects us all, even in those places wrongly considered ‘distant,’ and they do so with a tenderness of attention and care toward the lands, creatures, and communities depicted. Watson wonders, ‘If mine is a love story,’ and yes, Ghosts of Distant Trees is, indeed, a love story, one that contends with the complexity, loss, and labor that comes with finding oneself entangled with something to which we know we cannot lay claim but with which we still yearn to belong.”
—Sean Enfield, author of Holy American Burnout!

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 18h

🫠 Thank you, Rick!

It can arrive in your mail too! Order here: porphyry.press/ghosts-of-di...

Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social · 1d

aaand we are officially in the hide-your-neighbors stage

Sophie Sherry @sophiesherry.bsky.social · 1d

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door.   It wasn’t the feds — it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help.

He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days.

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

Neighbor shielded 7-year-old during South Shore federal raid: ‘I didn’t want them to take her’

During the Sept. 30 raid one tenant protected a terrified girl and her mom. Remnants at the complex, including a detailed map of all the units, offer clues to what authorities may have known before th...

chicago.suntimes.com

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Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

สุพรรณิกาทร์ Supanika Ordoñez @spiraledu.bsky.social · 1d

Apparently the first three episodes of “The Last Frontier” have just dropped. About a prison transport plane suspiciously crashing near a “rugged Alaskan town”

I’ll watch so you don’t have to…

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 1d

“This is Alaska, where shapes never end and distance cannot possibly be perceived” thank you I’ll be using that line 😂

Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 1d

😂 it was! I think it was my dad’s from when he was a kid. It’s not like…standard tie size (I say, as I realize it’s really the only tie I have any sort of reference for lol)

Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

Heather Aruffo @haharuffo.bsky.social · 2d

Once again Fairbanks has proved that when we work hard together progressives win- we’ve done it three years in a row. This is how you win in a red state- you get on doors, you talk to people, you listen and you meet them where they’re at. So proud of my city

The Alaska Current @thealaskacurrent.com · 2d

In races for Fairbanks Mayor, Fairbanks City Council, Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board, progressives won all but one of the contested races, according to preliminary results.

Fairbanks progressives win near-sweep in local elections - The Alaska Current

Progressive candidate Mindy O’Neall’s victory over Fairbanks Mayor David Pruhs headlined a nearly clean sweep of the area’s local elections Tuesday night.

buff.ly

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Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

Senator Bernie Sanders @sanders.senate.gov · 3d

If you are a federal worker, there are several credit unions and other financial institutions that are offering zero interest loans during the government shutdown.

Please go to my website for more information: www.sanders.senate.gov/resources-fo...

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 2d

oh, that tie I used to wear on my head 😂 I only very recently moved it from the scarf drawer into the box of scarves I will never wear but can't get rid of

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 2d

In response to that skeet asking if anything amazing has ever happened to you bc of social media: my friendship w @halperta.bsky.social is rooted irl, & has crossed continents & platforms w long gaps & reunions, exchanges of art & ideas. My answer is yes (&)

I love seeing this book in the world!

Hannah Alpert-Abrams @halperta.bsky.social · 2d

Looking to read immersive, deeply considered essays about land, labor, and the subtle politics of inhabitation in rural Alaska?

I am so excited to have received Ghosts of Distant Trees by my incredibly talented friend @rickirobin.bsky.social

Photo of the cover of Ghosts of Distant Trees by Erica Watson, depicting pine trees in a circle of red and gold.

The back cover of Ghosts of Distant Trees with a blurb and description of the book. “In Ghosts of Distant Trees, Watson traces the layered ecologies of Denali National Park, Alaska - its vast, shifting landscape, seasonal labor rhythms, and the subtle politics of inhabitation.”

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 2d

I wrote 12 pages of Lacanian analysis of Julio Cortazar's short stories *in Spanish*, which I never actually mastered tbh, using only locutorio espresso, an English/Spanish dictionary, and my brain and all its regrets, in one 3-7am sitting. These AI junkies could never.

mivox is exHAUNTed 👻 @bs.mivox.net · 2d

I wrote almost all my college papers the night before they were due. I got mostly As. Two different professors (from my Criminology & Constitutional Law classes) took me aside at the end of the term to offer letters of recommendation to law school.

I should have gone to law school.

Popehat Agitates And Irritates @kenwhite.bsky.social · 2d

I wrote my take-home final for Law of War at 4 a.m., still half-drunk. It was due at 9 a.m. I got a B, which was my school's equivalent of taking you behind the barn and shooting you. It dropped my honors one level. My father was perturbed.

Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 2d

Seriously. The daily whiplash between "give them all my money!" and "STFU NPR" is exhausting

Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 2d

"...resisting AI’s further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don’t publish AI bullshit. Don’t even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit."

by @nplusonemag.com

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

Large Language Muddle | The Editors

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

www.nplusonemag.com

Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

CeeJay Johnson-Yellow Hawk @adriftalchemist.bsky.social · 3d

when big storms hit rural alaska communities, i struggle to sleep until it passes and we get word that they’re safe

"our greatest fear is a storm will hit shaktoolik in the middle of the night and, when we pick up the phone in the morning the line is dead, and the whole community is wiped out."

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Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

Yashar Ali 🐘 @yasharali.bsky.social · 3d

BREAKING

In a new video, Dolly Parton, the Queen of America, says she’s going to be ok.

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 4d

anxious and foggy-brained today. is it bc i had a 4pm coffee yesterday or bc i'm living in a failed state? who's to say

Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 4d

“We want a fair process, but only if that process results in approval of the road”

Matt Buxton @matt.akmemo.com · 4d

Murkowski notes that Biden canceled the approval of the project because it lacked adequate input from the local communities, but then adds that it has already "undergone great public input over the years."

She recognizes it may harm subsistence rights, but is committed to a "fair process."

Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

Imani Gandy Corn 🎃 @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 5d

you are no longer allowed to have imposter syndrome.

not after this bari omgwtf weiss situation.

you're literally not allowed to feel imposter syndrome ANYMORE

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Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

Rheum Cat @rheumcat.bsky.social · 7d

Long live the PDX frog

Krassensteins @krassenstein.bsky.social · 7d

Oh no MAGA! Look at the Antifa Frog in Portland, Oregon.

Is this really what you guys consider to be “domestic terrorists?”

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 7d

"Ultimately, [21 year old organizer Linnea Lentfer] finds solace in a key recognition. “There’s nothing worse to do than to not try,” she says."

good overview by @antoniajuhasz.bsky.social

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Inside the Fight Against Trump's Alaskan Pipe Dream

Donald Trump is using Alaska and a proposed LNG pipeline to kickstart his fossil-fueled "National Energy Dominance" agenda. Alaskans are resisting.

www.rollingstone.com

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 8d

I’m actually kind of alarmed by some of the directions my phone tried to take that

Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 8d

Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, I think the only way to stop the spread of communism is to get a vaccine
…
🤔

some like it scott @scottymax.bsky.social · 8d

"Due to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown," [predictive text]

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 8d

Sorry to be so heteronormative on main but goddam c gets shit done around the house during a government shutdown

Reposted by Erica 👻 🌲 📕

Preorder Read This When Things Fall Apart @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 8d

You can see how their cameramen document their violence. This is about content creation. For the last one, I had to search my files for a photo of this moment that didn't include the face of a pained or screaming protester, but for clarity: those are tackled human beings on the ground.

DHS cameramen film their assault on tackled protesters.

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 8d

For logistical/travel schedule reasons, my publisher started w some of the lower 48 (& maybe SE?) orders, & he’s heading back to AK soon along with most of the books & get the AK orders out soon

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Erica 👻 🌲 📕 @rickirobin.bsky.social · 8d

Aah, I’m loving hearing from people who just got their shipping notifications! I’m so excited for this book to meet its readers. (Which, bc of the idiosyncrasies of Alaska shipping, might happen before I meet it irl 😅)

Shannon Kelly Donahue @shannonkellydonahue.com · 8d

Eeeeeee my copy of @rickirobin.bsky.social’s new essay collection has finally shipped! Can’t wait to read it at last.
You should order it too, or request that your public library does:
porphyry.press/store/p/preo...
#AlaskaSky #BookSky

Ghosts of Distant Trees by Erica Watson · PREORDER — Porphyry Press

Examinations of the expansive, dynamic landscape of Denali National Park, Alaska, and a community shaped by the seasonal fluctuations of a tourism economy and subarctic latitude. Debut memoir in essay...

porphyry.press

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