The Get List

Abstract

TV Producer Brooke Quinn escapes to a remote Alaskan fish camp. There, free from the professional pressure to stay unpregnant, she can pursue her next story. Or so she hopes. In a trade of stories with a fishwife, Brooke learns to salt salmon and what it takes to make it as an Outsider in the Alaskan Bush. A tenuous friendship builds as Brooke learns firsthand about the Alaska Native women gone missing in her fishing village, their names listed in an oilman’s yacht logbook and disguised as deckhands. The dark discovery convinces Brooke to extend her stay, immersing herself in a new language and people. Brooke wagers it all—her reputation, her marriage, her chance to start a family—to get the story that could make or break her career. But landing the logbook traced to the revered CEO of Arc’d, a major oil company celebrated for its green practices, could land her name on his “get list,” the women invited to his yacht who never return. This creative work anchors me both in the culminating mission of my master’s–-publishing a novel—and my craft study: create intimacy with my audience through interiority. By focusing on the “inside voice” of the protagonist, Brooke Quinn, the craft challenge becomes constructing her interior world. The interiority must draw readers into a psychological escape so intoxicating that the emotional weight exchanged between the character and the reader genuinely resonates. To do this, I draw on plot-rich scenes from my professional experience: from covering an oil spill in the Gulf and dark money ties in Arctic Alaska to interviewing the CEO of the much-revered company Rivian ahead of its $5-billion electric car company being built in rural Georgia. As my muse Charlotte Brontë might say, Reader, I’m ready to write!