Hope

In HOPE, Sommer Schafer weaves together the lives of an isolated island community in Hope, Alaska. This collection of linked stories pulls readers into the surreal, comical, and at times chilling existence of its residents-people who have shunned modern trappings for lives that seek purchase on the rugged and anonymous edge of the wilderness. Blake Lindstrom, a fervent back-to-earther, lives with his family in a 96-square-foot shed on a cliff above the ocean where he’s waging a quiet war against his neighbor, Alan Neuman, who chopped off tree tops for a better ocean view. Mayor Marc Randal is running a covert meth operation, and therapist Lauren is forced to confront a haunting past she can’t deny any longer. Jennifer and Dylan Tuttle are raising their eleven children in a fundamentalist religion of their own invention, and 79-year-old local witch, Maggie Whitehall, uses her magic to help young Holly enact revenge on her cheating husband. For Dusty, an adolescent mixed-race Tlingit, and his Grandmother, the scars of colonialism and white supremacy linger in complex cycles of trauma, and roaming Bear struggles to live in the land of his ancestors that can no longer love and nurture him. Through these entangled lives, HOPE asks an essential question: To what extent can we, should we, bury the past?

Author Biography

Sommer Schafer is Senior Editor of The Forge Literary Magazine and widely published, including a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2019. Her first book, THE WOMEN, a collection of short stories, was released by Unsolicited Press in November 2023. She lives on Coast Miwok land with her family, a rescue dove, and a bearded dragon.