With new book and wide-ranging endeavors, M.C. MoHagani Magnetek adds to tapestry of Alaskan experience

This is part of Alaska Authors, an occasional series about authors and other literary figures with ties to the 49th state.

M.C. MoHagani Magnetek has been a lot of things. Poet, archaeologist, anthropologist, activist, art curator and now, author of a new book: “MoHagani vs. King Salmon,” illustrated by Toronto-based artist Janine Carrington.

“We struggle with it,” Magnetek said of her and Carrington’s efforts at defining precisely what they created. “Is this a children’s book? Is this a picture book? Or is it a comic book? It’s kind of a hybrid. And I think it does something completely different in the literary landscape here in Alaska.”

The story has four characters, Magnetek herself as a young woman; Raven, embodying the trickster spirit in Alaska Native folklore; Tahku the Whale, who disapproves of humans fishing for sport; and King Salmon, a feisty fish passing through Gastineau Channel who encounters Magnetek and immediately starts hurling gentle but teasing “yo’ mama” jokes her way. The ensuing battle, brought to life by Carrington’s wildly colorful illustrations, combines wordplay with art in a story suitable for all ages.

Magnetek conceived “MoHagani vs. King Salmon” while teaching a narrative writing course for young people at Juneau’s Perseverance Theatre. Having assigned her students the overnight task of writing stories, she gave herself the same challenge. Basing her tale on African American vernacular and a recent fishing trip in Kenai with a friend, she found her idea. “I shared it with those kids the next day,” she recalled, “and immediately they started telling yo’ mama jokes.”

“Yo’ mama” jokes are deeply rooted in African American cultural traditions, Magnetek said, “but to me, it’s not enough to rehash these same things, to keep tradition alive.” Instead, she said, she wants to “remix it, mash it up, make it something different, new, fresh.”

As she developed the story over the next couple of years, Magnetek kept it humorous and lighthearted, purposefully avoiding the sometimes cruel aspects of the jokes. “I think one of the magical things about this work is that it turns that narrative upside down,” she said.

It was this innovative approach that attracted Carrington to the book when Magnetek contacted her about illustrating it. “It’s more of a cultural work, which I believe is what we’re up for now in terms of black liberation, in terms of children’s literature,” she said, describing it as “a carefree story, because the messaging isn’t very heavy.”

Magnetek followed a winding pathway into Alaska. An Army brat originally from Houston, she spent time in Arizona, Atlanta, Germany and elsewhere before her father was stationed in Anchorage, where she attended what is now Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School, graduating in 1994.

From there she returned to Texas and enrolled in college, but money issues forced a pause and “it became this long journey of being in and out of school.” She worked different jobs while pursuing a childhood love of writing poetry, and published her first book, “BFAP nSIGHTINGS @ da Bus Stop,” in 1997.

“It was poetry based on riding the city bus and those experiences that I have. This is anthropology at play. Cultural anthropology is participant observation. You sit and you watch people and interactions with folks. Poetry still serves that way for me as a methodology of note taking.”

Seeking to make ends meet, she enlisted in the Coast Guard in 2004, becoming a marine science technician. “I was a first responder. I’ve seen a lot of floating bodies out there. Remains, bridge jumpers, those people we saved and then there were some we couldn’t save. Those experiences were very traumatizing.”

While still in the Coast Guard, she completed her anthropology degree through Thomas Edison State University in New Jersey, followed by a graduate certificate in forensics from the University of Florida.

Mentally she was struggling, however, and in 2012, suffering PTSD, she received a medical discharge. Fully open about her mental health struggles, she explained that “between the trauma, the things that I’ve seen and faced as a first responder, and the depression from bipolar disorder, from 2010 to 2017 I was hospitalized, maybe on average every three, four months.”

Needing a place to settle, Magnetek remembered feeling at home in Anchorage and returned to Alaska in 2012. Still identifying as male, she was accused by her roommate there of being gay. It was a revelation.

“I was like, you’re right, I am a girl,” she recalls saying. “It was the first time I had said it out loud. I admitted it and everything. I started my transitioning process after that.”

From there, she said, “things took a big turn. I was happy.”

The following year, she entered the women’s bathroom in a nightclub and ran afoul of management. Overnight she became the center of social media attention, including virulent abuse.

“In 2013, there were no protections for trans folks,” she said. “And on top of that, many people here had never even seen an African American trans woman. So I was always an anomaly.”

Magnetek became an activist for Anchorage’s queer community. She helped with the successful defeat of the city’s Proposition 1 in 2018, the so-called bathroom bill that defined sex as determined at birth, and in 2020 took part in a lie-down protest at City Hall.

During the same period, she returned to school, earning an English degree from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2016, followed by an MFA in creative writing in 2020. She also began hosting poetry readings, and founded the $100 Cash Prize Poetry Slam in 2019 at The Writer’s Block Bookstore & Cafe.

“That’s been a great relationship,” she said. Noting the slam’s unusual durability for a poetry event, she added, “it’s like a miracle. It’s an anomaly in the poetry scene.”

Despite enduring multiple incidents of prejudice against her, by 2021, Magnetek had shifted from direct activism toward a gentler approach, one inclusive of everyone, especially young people. “I made that choice to move away from always fighting and harboring anger in my heart to zoning in on my art and on my creativity.”

To this end, she founded Edutainment Nite Publishing, focused on printing the work of marginalized northern authors. “I want to help them get their stories out so we can get these narratives about our experiences in Alaska, in the Arctic, on paper.”

More recently, she entered the Ph.D. anthropology program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where her work centers on finding the nexus of anthropology, archaeology and museum curating, as well as researching the lengthy history of African Americans in Alaska.

This summer, as part of her dissertation work, Magnetek is heading up excavation work on a campsite for the 97th Regiment of the Army Corps of Engineers who worked on building the Alcan Highway during World War II. The site is near the Robertson River Bridge, close to Tetlin. “This is going to be the first exclusively African American archaeological site in Alaska,” she said.

In her work as an archaeologist and anthropologist, Magnetek has discovered a kaleidoscope of Native, Black, Asian, Russian, American and other cultures intermixing and making Alaska a diverse and vibrant place, and she sees “MoHagani vs. King Salmon” as one more piece in an ever-expanding understanding of what it means to be Alaskan.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “I’m in the midst of it, and I’m seeing these things happen.”