By ARIADNE WILL
Sentinel Staff Writer
Amy Butcher says her latest memoir, “Mothertrucker,” is rooted in curiosity.
The book – out Monday – features the relationship between the author and Joy Wiebe, who earned the nickname “Mothertrucker” over her 13-year career as the only female driver of big rigs on Alaska’s long haul Dalton Highway.
Butcher, a professional writer from Ohio, is known in Sitka as a writing instructor in summers for young people at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp.
Intrigued by Wiebe’s Instagram account — and by Wiebe as a woman making her way in the man’s world of trucking in arctic Alaska — Butcher flew to Fairbanks in April 2018 to accept Wiebe’s offer to let her ride along on a journey to the North Slope oil fields. Butcher thought it would be the first of a few trips she would make with Wiebe.
But in August of that year Wiebe died at age 50 in an accident on the haul road, and Butcher said that changed the course of her book.
“As a writer, it was obvious that I would return in September and October once she was back in her truck, and then I would conflate those two stories into one, so that I was in the truck the whole time,” Butcher told the Sentinel. “Instead, she died in August, before I could come back.”
Amy Butcher (Sentinel Photo)
For Butcher, the story she was trying to tell remained the same, but she was now tasked with telling Wiebe’s story without any more of Wiebe’s help – and while reckoning, too, with Wiebe’s death.
“I didn’t want her death to overshadow the story of who she was,” Butcher said, adding that Wiebe’s death meant that Butcher was left to decide what was fit to print in the book without help from the subject.
“It was an ethical minefield,” she said. “When I started the book, Joy was alive, and there was no reason to think Joy wouldn’t be alive in the near future.”
But Butcher says she felt she had made a commitment to tell Wiebe’s story.
“I feel I know the things I know because she told them to me (knowing) I was writing a book about her,” she said. “Ultimately, I feel my obligation is to Joy and the story she would want me to tell, before she knew she was going to die.”
But Butcher made sure, too, that she wasn’t just writing about Wiebe without also examining herself.
“My own story weaves in between there,” she says. “I really believe that if you’re going to write open(ly) and honestly about other people and their lives, you need to do the same with yourself and put yourself under the microscope.”
For Butcher, her relationship with Wiebe – and her interrogation of it – have brought to light the ways in which the women supported each other.
“I think (the book is) largely about women’s friendships, and how women help each other and want to help each other,” Butcher said.
“For me, personally, I think the things Joy was able to teach me in such a short amount of time… changed the course of my life, for the better. The way in which women bend and give and help each other, and how grounding and stabilizing that can be in a really patriarchal society is ultimately what I want to do.”
A reivew of “Mothertrucker” is to appear in Monday’s Sentinel.
