Author's book characters are composites of real people in Southeast

When Christi Slaven's kids were tiny, she set her typewriter down on the breakfast bar in her parents' house and wrote a novel.

She burned all 300 pages when she was done.

"It was terrible," Slaven said.

But she felt better afterward, because she was "going nuts" taking care of her two young daughters. Writing gave her a creative outlet.

Her daughter, Kelly Ellis, who lives and works in Wrangell, remembers that time.

"I was little, 2, 3, 4?" Ellis recalled. "She had a typewriter, and she had a kitchen bar, and she'd stand at the kitchen bar and write. My younger sister and I generally annoyed her. It was pretty cute."

A book Slaven didn't burn that made it into print is "Home is Where the Fish Are."

Slaven published it in 2018 though she wrote the manuscript 40 years earlier after she moved to Petersburg in 1978, to get a snapshot of the town before it changed.

A "subset of attitudes" moved to town in the late 1970s, she said. Fishermen would leave the dock with everything invested in their boat and business. It was a different kind of livelihood for people who worked at the hospital or at city hall, Slaven said, with a paycheck and retirement account.

"You don't have the insecurity of these people fishing who don't know if they're going to make a nickel or come back with their lives intact," she said.

In the '70s and '80s there was a blossoming of U.S. Forest Service employment, the school district got bigger, and pretty soon you had a mass of people "who are just divorced from the lifeblood of the town," she said. "They don't understand it."

Slaven wanted to capture the respect fisherman get - and also portray the old Norwegian, self-sufficient, closely related, closely intertwined families. "My sister calls it incestuous."

Slaven has seven books in her online bookstore. "White Raven" came out in 2020. All of the characters in her books are portraits of the Southeast towns she has lived in and traveled among.

While the characters are composites of the people she's known, she knows them better than anyone saying hello on the street.

"I know these characters better than some of the people I call friends here," Slaven said. When she writes, especially the dialogue, she'll read it back to herself and take note of where her hands are going, what her face does, even where her eyebrows are. From that, "I describe how that person acts and talks and thinks," she said.

Slaven's experience in commercial fishing comes to bear on passages that deftly weave technical aspects of fishing vessels around the characters as they move around the pages and each other -as they fume, argue, fish, fight bad weather and a growing attraction to each other.

"It's part of the visualization process, she said. "Sometimes it's hard to explain the technical aspects without being technical. You still need to understand this is a business. Your life depends on how well you understand the technicals." One thing she did at the beginning of every chapter of "Home is Where the Fish Are" is explain technical terms to help the flow of the book.

Both "White Raven" and "Home is Where the Fish Are" feature very different love stories, but each of the main character's male love interests in the two books, while very different from each other - one fiery, one reserved - are based on the same person, she said.

"He doesn't know. He doesn't recognize it, which is so funny," Slaven said.

Everything is a love story, she said.

"The New Testament is a love story. I'm not embarrassed by that. I don't think it cheapens what I write, but it doesn't always dominate what I write either. 'Home is Where the Fish Are' is a portrait of the town. What is a town, but a series of relationship stories? A community?"