Toward the end of "How Tununak Came to Me," the story of Carolyn Kre-mers's move from her comfortable life in the Colorado foothills to the frozen, foreign Alaskan outback becomes a kind of letter to the author's former partner, Michael, whom she left behind in Boulder. The transition from first-person narration to apostrophe-second-person address of a person not present-is striking and daring.

"That's a good example of how the essay got crafted," says Kremers, who believes revision is the key to well-wrought nonfiction. "That part used to be at the beginning and the end, as a frame. I like it best now, the way it is there. That's the way it is now in the book. . . . Michael was the driving force in the story. That style keeps cropping up-that's a thread."

Another strong thread Kremers says appears throughout her writing is her interest in cultures that are "at risk," such as the Eskimo culture and the Alaskan environment. Her corresponding desire to preserve what is at risk spurred her to write about her experiences as a white woman working among Eskimos in their native country.

Like most of her pieces, Kremers says, "How Tununak Came to Me" began with an image. She drew on those initial ideas, she says, using writing to find out where they would lead and what they had to teach her. Along the way, she depended upon the keen observational powers of a reporter to gather sensory detail and dialogue to make the piece a vicarious experience for the reader.

"As I went along, I wrote more about the people around me, the things they did, their subsistence activities, their family ties, their beliefs about religion, the environment, the weather-a lot of the things that were not just my property. They were actually the Eskimos' life," she says.

"But I was writing about it from my viewpoint. Nonfiction writers have the responsibility first of all to remind readers that it's coming from their own point of view. And that's exactly what journalists have been taught not to do."

Kremers says she views this responsibility as part of a contract of trust the writer strikes with the reader.

"As soon as we mix in the artistic element, we're not just reporting," she says. "We're crafting a story. That's where it becomes so challenging to be ethical and also to be artistic. We can't regulate it. We have to just trust."