"Dance, dance, dance: Alaska stories"

Zoë E. Wise
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:45:45 PDT

Dance, Dance, Dance: Alaska Stories is a collection of young women's coming of age stories. The protagonists range in age from teenager to middle aged, and the circumstances that provoke their epiphanies include events spanning from the mundane to the dramatic, such as looking through a photo album, and death. Protagonists who move through these cumulative events seek to emerge from past identities and understandings of themselves. In all of these stories the Alaskan setting is important. Physical environment, in some stories, is only perceived to be a barrier; in other stories, the setting functions as a conflict that frustrates characters' desires. Regardless, all protagonists, to a degree, ultimately realize themselves to be a barrier, and must overcome internal conflicts before coming to terms with--or abandoning--their external environment. A technical aspect of these stories that I have particularly focused on developing is the varied point of view. The ranges of points of view in these stories include retrospective first person, second person, and third person limited. In this collection I focused on the irony that each point of view, when working with a coming of age story, can provide. Narrative distance in these stories is used to highlight the difference between what the characters know and understand and what we, the readers, understand about their situations