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Living “Within The Wild” has been a challenge and an adventure for Alaska chef, author and lodge owner Kirsten Dixon.

Along with her husband, Carl, and two daughters, Carly and Amanda, she lives on remote Winter Lake in Southcentral Alaska. Owners of the adventure travel lodge business Within the Wild, the Dixons have spent 25 years living close to nature and far from nearly everything else.

“We’re nearly 200 miles northwest of Anchorage, and far out from the nearest town. My closest neighbor is 40 miles away,” Dixon said of her home on Winter Lake. “We live very close to nature.”

Dixon will be participating in the upcoming book festival presented by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Summer Sessions program. She’ll provide a demonstration of some of her recipes, including a favorite appetizer often served at the lodge bar, loved by family and guests — cheese puff pastries filled with smoked salmon cardamom — and do some readings of some of her essays.

Her demonstration will begin at 10 a.m. June 14 at the Hutchison Institute of Technology.

Dixon’s cooking style and repertoire fit quite snuggly into the book festival’s theme, Naturally Alaska, as does her entire take on life. Excited to be an Alaskan, Dixon said she arrived in Anchorage in 1980 and spent some time working as a nurse in the public health sector. She met her husband there and found they shared a passion for nature and a desire to live more closely with the land.

“We wanted to live out of doors and work closely together, so in 1982 we quit our jobs and moved out to start in the lodging business in remote Alaska,” she recalled. “It was a risk. It was an adventure we wanted to experience.”

In addition to her ownership of the Within The Wild business, Dixon is a chef and an award-winning cookbook author — her first cookbook, “The Riversong Lodge Cookbook,” earned the Gourmand International Cookbook Award. That honor is notable, but not one that defines the woman, chef, author and mother.

“I don’t think of myself as an award-winning author. I think of myself as someone who lives in a beautiful, rugged place that I love. I am someone who works hard at living and enjoy how I live and what I do,” she explained.

“The Riversong Lodge Cookbook,” named after the lodge Dixon and her husband sold about five years ago, is a collection of recipes that became favorites while the couple cooked for their daughters and their many guests at the lodge. She relies heavily upon regionally and seasonally grown food, basing her recipes on items grown locally, often in her own garden, whenever they are available.

It is an approach that has been highly refined during her 25 years of remote life: The Dixons raise chickens, catch fish, grow vegetables and create culinary favorites with the fruits of their labor.

“I have a lot of back-country cooking experience,” she said. “I believe the food we bring into our lives can help define who we are.”

Her writing career took a new path after she started working toward a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing through Goddard College. While working on exercises and reading the required literature, she began writing a lot about her home, about Alaska and what being an Alaskan meant to her.

“I really started reflecting on how I’ve lived here all this time. It has been a story of discovery for me, coming to appreciate the aesthetics of nature and the environment I live in,” she said.

Those reflections have become a major part of her second cookbook, “The Winterlake Lodge Cookbook,” which weaves together the many elements of Dixon’s life, including her time in the kitchen.

“I believe all Alaskans have a story to tell with the food they eat and how it is prepared. It is a part of the story of who we are,” she said.