Kendra Langford Shaw to visit Spokane to discuss debut novel, boom and bust cycle of arctic treasure hunting

Kendra Langford Shaw is a product of her, often natural, environment.

Shaw grew up the oldest of five siblings in Sitka, Alaska, until she was 8 years old. The family then relocated to a rural ranch in Montana. She has stayed in the Billings area, and now serves on the City Council.

The last frontier still looms large in Shaw’s memory, she said. Her debut novel “The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos” captures the natural wonders that delighted her as a child “in a very particular way,” she said.

“Like just so big, extra big and vibrant,” Shaw said. “I didn’t have the sort of adult version of it to compare to, so it’s always like trees that are just crazy tall and all this stuff that sort of made its way into the book in that way, which was fun to get to explore again.”

Shaw will visit Spokane to discuss her novel with The Spokesman-Review’s Nick Gibson on July 15 as part of the Northwest Passages book club. Tickets for the 7 p.m. event at the Montvale Event Center can be purchased online at spokesman.com/northwest-passages.

“The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos,” is set in a not-so-distant future, when the Arctic territories serve as the last stop for homesteaders. Readers follow the Spahr family throughout generations, from first arrival to great-great-great-great-grandchildren as they grapple with a changing natural landscape.

Littered across Shaw’s fictional landscape are treasures, large pianos, originally brought by the first homesteaders and inevitably lost along the journey. The Spahr children hope to cut into the burgeoning market for the weathered instruments, but environmental threats to their oceanic way of life complicate their efforts. Shaw said she wanted to explore what it meant to be in an nonrenewable industry destined for a bust.

“I grew up in two places that are very dependent on natural resources and have long histories of these boom and bust cycles,” Shaw said. “Like Montana, it’s gold and copper and silver and oil, and we have these towns that spring up and then die, these places that boom and then bust.”

Shaw said the whimsical trade sprung from her father’s job while they lived in Alaska. Her parents were recruited to the state as teachers in the early ’80s, and as a music teacher, her father was tasked with delivering instruments to remote schools. She was thinking about the role as a graduate student at the University of Michigan and wrote a short story. The novel came together over the subsequent decade, a bit at a time, she said.

“What would have happened if his plane had gone down or thousands of these planes had gone down, and so you just had musical instruments that had been abandoned and people were finding them and like finding new value in them for different reasons,” Shaw said. “And I ended up honing in on pianos.”

Shaw’s upbringing in the West’s natural landscapes was not the only element of her childhood she got to explore in penning her novel. She wove bits of her siblings into the main characters, the three Sohr family children. She said she wanted to capture the dynamic of growing up in an age without screens and tablets, when she and her siblings had to be industrious for fun in their rural locales.

“I feel like so much of my life is just what me and my siblings were up to,” Shaw said.

That natural environment is changing, Shaw said, which is why she wove climate change into the narrative of “The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos.” She said she sees the effects, in very different ways, in her two home states. While wildfires grow in size and intensity in Montana, waters are rising in Alaska.

“Just like us, they’re trying to figure out like how do you build a life in a place where the land is literally disappearing out from under you, and what does that mean?” Shaw said.

Shaw said the decision to leave or stay and rough it out is something she’s always found interesting. It’s a question she expects many to consider across the West in the years to come.

“I think it’s just something we all have to contend with,” Shaw said. “It happens much faster in the book than it’s happening in real life, but we don’t know what the future is going to bring. We’re all gonna have to think about that and work through that for ourselves.”