Alaskatarian is the name Amy gave to her evolving diet after she moved to Alaska and shifted from vegetarian to eating occasional meals including wild caught fish and game. Alaskatarian is subsistence, it’s foraging, it’s making do and putting up. It’s caring about what’s on the table and where it comes from even while juggling rural Alaskan food pricing and restricted access to ingredients.

Amy O’Neill Houck is a writer and artist. She just returned to Cordova, Alaska after seven years living in the “big city” of Juneau. Cordova has “no road,” meaning food, people, and everything else needs to come to town via water or air.

Amy has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. She writes a quarterly column about wild foods for Edible Alaska magazine. She’s contributed articles to The Cordova Times, The Juneau Empire and The Capital City Weekly, and she’s the former nutrition editor of Vegetarian Baby and Child magazine (acquired by Veg News). Amy has led wild food walks and cooking workshops for the Juneau branch of the UAF Cooperative Extension.

Amy is a teaching artist listed on the Alaska State Teaching Artist Roster (STAR) with the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council teaching artist roster. Amy teaches fiber arts, creative writing, wild food culinary arts, and ukulele. You can read more about her teaching artist work.

Amy has published three books and contributed many articles in her work as a crochet and knitwear designer. Her knitting and crochet web site is The Hook and I. She is the former commissioning editor of Inside Crochet magazine. She’s worked as a technical editor for Interweave Crochet, and she has over 70 published designs. She has an online class available via Craftsy.com: My First Crochet Shawl.