I am always acutely aware that we grow writers from the ground up. I wouldn’t be a writer today if my mother had not hauled me at age eight up the ladder from the Celtic to the dock and marched me down the boardwalk to the Seldovia Public Library, where she introduced me to my…
Brisk, well written, continent by continent (excluding Australia) survey of how geography is destiny, beginning with Putin going down on his knees every night to ask God why He didn’t put mountains in Ukraine. I really liked the way Marshall organized it, too. The first chapter is Russia and how so much of their actions…
Read more …why the entire continent of Africa is becoming a Chinese colony…
I remember when I got to the end of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma thinking, “Well, what the hell CAN I eat, then?” Although the image of that potato farmer covered in fertilizer did stick, I was pretty much done with Pollan lecturing me on how everything I buy in a supermarket contributes to the destruction of…
[for the Poisoned Pen Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, July 13, 2012] Sometimes research is easy. When I lived in Anchorage my house was right under the traffic pattern to the seaplane base of Lake Hood. One day my father was helping me with something in my back yard and a Cessna 206…
This Friday at 6pm Alaska Time, author Jesse Wegman will join the Homer Public Library to discuss his book about the Electoral College. Click here to join the Zoom conversation.The book is available from the Homer Bookstore. [My February 2020 review] Never mind the elections of 2000 and 2016, I’ve disliked the whole notion of…
[Originally posted November 2, 2011. One of the best parts of #thiswritinglife is sometimes you get to hang out with really cool people and do really cool things.] The worst thing about the Writers’ Police Academy is that you can’t split yourself into quadruplets so you can see and do everything on offer. Shallow grave…
Two men lay dead on a battlefield and one said “Hey!” That’s my new favorite first line from a novel. If you don’t know anything else, you might be pardoned for making some assumptions as to the novel’s genre. Two men are dead on a battlefield. War novel? Two dead men are having a conversation. …
Read more Two dead men are having a conversation. Vampire novel?
Remember earlier in #thiswritinglife I enjoined the writers among you to never pass up an opportunity to stretch your writing muscle. And then Byron Birdsall got in touch to ask me to write a foreword to his collection of black-and-white drawings called Byron Birdsall’s Alaska. Never pass up an opportunity to stretch your writing muscle.…
Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant is a different kind of crime novel, and not just for its vibrant street view of modern India. Vish Puri is no loner PI in the traditional Sam Spade mold. He’s the proprietor of Most Private Investigators Ltd., a thriving concern. He has employees. He has an…
[ITW interview with Gwen Florio, upon the publication of Less Than a Treason in 2017. Edited.] You are best known for your twenty-book series featuring Kate Shugak, an Aleut private investigator who lives in a fictional park in Alaska (we’ll get to the other three series in a bit). Let me repeat that: twenty books…
