{"id":15842,"date":"2024-08-07T08:32:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-07T12:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/?p=15842"},"modified":"2024-08-07T09:53:05","modified_gmt":"2024-08-07T13:53:05","slug":"professor-jennifer-brice-is-north-bound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/2024\/08\/07\/professor-jennifer-brice-is-north-bound\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Jennifer Brice Is North Bound"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In her new memoir, she writes about life in Alaska and beyond.<\/h2>\n\n\n
\n
\"Illustration
Illustration by Polly Becker<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Professor Jennifer Brice writes that she is \u201cridiculously vain\u201d about the fact that she has a \u201cworking knowledge of aeronautical charts.\u201d Born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, she knows how to both fly a plane and drive a dump truck. In Another North<\/em>, a collection of essays she wrote over 25 years, the English professor reveals parts of herself and ruminates on \u201cthe questions that have engaged me,\u201d she said during a spring Brown Bag at Colgate\u2019s Women\u2019s Studies Center. \u201cThe questions are rooted in dialectical materialism and the tension between what are generally regarded as higher order concerns \u2014 the intellect, ideas, books, solitude,\u201d she said, \u201cand lower order ones \u2014 the senses, safety, bodily comfort, romance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following excerpt is from an essay titled \u201cTheory of Life,\u201d in which Brice draws on literary criticism to interpret the stories of her life. In a section of the essay, called \u201cNarrative,\u201d she recaps what she calls her \u201corigin story,\u201d telling the tale of how her parents met and fell in love. \u201cIt\u2019s a reminder of how contingent all of our lives are on a particular set of circumstances, how dependent we are on stories,\u201d Brice says of the history her parents recited throughout her life. \u201cSometimes we feel something powerful,\u201d she says, \u201cand in order to understand, we have to put a story to those feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Narrative<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNot only do we tell stories, but stories tell us.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Another<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

For the last time, my mother\u2019s foundation myth: Born at Babies Hospital in New York to a Brown- and Harvard-educated surgeon and his socialite wife. Educated at Emma Willard, Colby College, and Columbia-Presbyterian School of Nursing. On a lark, accepted a public health nurse position in Alaska. Met a guy who wasn\u2019t right for her but who happened to have an older brother he worshiped. For him, it was love at first sight. They went on several dates: curling with friends, dinner at Club 11, where they danced to \u201cMoon River.\u201d He proposed; she demurred. He pressed his case with a Tiffany\u2019s diamond and dozens of yellow roses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The day after she said yes, Alba flew out East. Biding his time while Carol and her mother planned a speeded-up wedding \u2014 Lent was coming \u2014 he finished the flying lessons he\u2019d begun in Fairbanks, doing his first solo and earning his private pilot\u2019s license. On Feb. 17, 1962, Carol Ann met him at the altar of All Saints Episcopal Church in North Adams, Mass. She wore a raw silk ballgown with an Alen\u00e7on lace veil. Dressed in red velvet cocktail dresses, her bridesmaids carried rabbit fur muffs rather than flowers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On receiving, via telegram, the news of my birth, just over a year later, my surgeon grandfather pronounced me \u201cJ.P., the lumber baroness.\u201d It was a joke. At the time, my father was still working as a mechanic for Pan Am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decades passed. To build their company, my father and his brothers worked brutal hours in conditions so cold and dangerous, they hardly bear thinking about. There were a lot of lean years and a few profitable ones, enough to outfit us in the trappings of the middle class: Hawaiian vacations, orthodontics, college tuition, a series of Volvo station wagons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2012 the company that my father founded with his father and three brothers was purchased by one of Alaska\u2019s large Native corporations. This scenario is the Alaska equivalent of winning the lottery. The Native corporation installed my brother as president and CEO of the Brice Companies. One of his first acts was to hire my father and one of my uncles \u2014 the one who\u2019d set my parents up on their first date \u2014 as consultants. At first, this was painful for my father and his brother. Then, when the extent of their windfall sunk in, they used some of the money to buy back some of the fun they\u2019d missed by working so hard for all those years. They bought matching airplanes, took up gold mining, built vacation cabins in remote places, then the riverboats that were required to reach those cabins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My parents began spending long stretches of every winter in Key West or Hawaii. In the summer, between stays at one or the other of their cabins, they putter around the Fairbanks house. Dad builds treehouses for his grandchildren and patches the lawn. Mom grows dinner-plate-sized dahlias in the garden and throws teddy bear tea parties for the grandchildren. She is growing vague and forgetful, soft around the edges. She still bakes pies, though, with rhubarb from her garden. Before working the crust, she takes off her engagement ring and sets it on the windowsill. Sometimes in the winter, Dad puts on his Carhartt overalls to chop wood or plow the driveway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A while back, when it became clear Mom could no longer keep track of things like reading glasses and keys, he had new locks installed, ones with a passcode they can both remember: 0-2-17. On that day, every year, Dad still brings Mom a bouquet of yellow roses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my professional life, I spend a lot of time thinking about the stories we tell and the ones we don\u2019t. Why do our set pieces come off in some contexts, fall flat in others? Is it an accident of timing? A trick of the light? And why do the stories that sustained us as children often lose their shine, failing to grow along with us? Every semester, I put Joan Didion\u2019s \u201cWhite Album\u201d in front of my students, pointing out the opening line: \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live.\u201d I share with them Patricia Hampl\u2019s mantra, from \u201cMemory and Imagination\u201d: \u201cRefuse to write your life, and you have no life.\u201d If there\u2019s time, I refer them to the work of Paul Armstrong, a neuroscientist who studies the human need for narrative, which satisfies the brain\u2019s need for pattern and consistency as well as its hunger for flexibility and openness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time and again, I urge my students to dig deep in the substrata of their lives, then to dig again, deeper still. Bring up whatever shards you can find, I tell them. Together, we\u2019ll turn those pieces into a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing my own advice. I\u2019m not as cynical as one or two writers I can think of \u2014 one of whom recently declared, in an interview, the end of character; the other of whom asserts loudly and often, to anyone who will listen, that narrative is dead. They both make compelling intellectual arguments; sap that I am, I sometimes find myself nodding in agreement while reading or hearing them. But they\u2019re wrong, of course. The human craving for characters and stories has changed over time, with technology (the New Yorker<\/em> profile giving way to the Instagram feed), but it hasn\u2019t disappeared altogether, and surely it won\u2019t \u2014 ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The danger I\u2019m thinking of is an entirely different one. I\u2019ve watched my mother use her stories sometimes as a cudgel (against my father\u2019s family and their working-class roots; against her own children, whose lives will never rise to the same level of interestingness as hers) and as cultural capital (against everyone else who washed up, for one reason or another, in one of the farthest north outposts of the continent).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Time and again, I urge my students to dig deep in the substrata of their lives, then to dig again, deeper still. Bring up whatever shards you can find, I tell them.<\/p>\nJennifer Brice<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Our stories ought to form a supple scaffolding, I think \u2014 a shape that can bend in the face of heavy winds. They shouldn\u2019t ossify over time but rather soften and recede. As we age, we should become more restrained in the telling and retelling of our own stories, more receptive to the stories of others. In Darwin\u2019s Worms<\/em>, his monograph on Darwin and Freud, Adam Phillips reminds us Freud adamantly refused to write the story of his own life, nor would he allow anyone else to do it for him. His resistance to autobiography, Phillips writes, was not due to evasiveness or a desire for control (though surely that was part of it). Rather, he believed (in Phillips\u2019 telling) that a person\u2019s \u201clife story was, in part, the ways in which a person avoided having a life story.\u201d In short, life is the thing that unfurls in resistance to \u2014 even opposition to \u2014 the stories we or others wish to tell about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Tidbits About Brice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
    \n
  • First job was writing obituaries for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner<\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Has three daughters, two of whom are identical twins<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Has a ghost in her house<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Earned her BA from Smith College and her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  • Calls Virginia Woolf \u201cthe generative angel\u201d of her new book, which is her third<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In her new collection of essays, Brice ruminates on the stories we tell ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1263,"featured_media":15843,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2455,496,684,376,2454,1066],"coauthors":[135],"class_list":["post-15842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-voices","tag-alask","tag-alaska","tag-author","tag-english","tag-jennifer-brice","tag-writer"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-47w","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2024\/08\/jennifer_revise_contrast.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15842"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15994,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15842\/revisions\/15994"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15842"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}