Editor’s Note: Thank you to Lisa Alexia for this review of Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth. Bathsheba will be teaching a nonfiction workshop for 49 Writers during her time in Anchorage. You can sign up on our web site. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, by Bathsheba Demuth (W.W. Norton & Co, […]
Lisa Alexia | Crossing Borders: Review of Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth Read More »
Northwords 2017: Discovering Paul Theroux By Katie Bausler and Amy O’Neill Houck, 49 Writers Board Members “All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.” ~Mao Tse Tung (as quoted by Paul Theroux) Before we signed up for the North Words Writer’s Symposium, held the first weekend in June in Skagway, neither of us had read Paul
Bausler & Houck | Northwords 2017: Discovering Paul Theroux Read More »
I’d spent years watching the sun set on a skyline of volcanoes, orange light streaking across Cook Inlet and into the windows of my home, twenty-six miles up the coast in the village of Seldovia. So why not walk there? Why not walk even farther? Why not begin at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula
Spotlight on Alaska Books | Mud Flats and Fish Camps by Erin McKittrick Read More »
Cheered on by readers who told me that an essay dedicated to old friend Norman Wilkins “worked,” though it was written in various moods and moments over about 20 years, I’m going to take a moment to finger that miracle. The essay is a small bucket of improbables—love for the consummate knowledge of two woodsman
Mary Odden | On Writing the Essay “March” Read More »
Thanks to all who turned out last week for a special Reading & Craft Talk Series event, this time held downtown at the 49th State Brewing Co. The event paired Kathleen Dean Moore and Libby Roderick on stage. Kathy is a philosopher and award-winning author best known for books about our cultural and spiritual relation
Jeremy Pataky | “What do you do when the life rafts are burning?” Read More »
Determined to finish a story I began a few years ago, set in my hometown of Butte, Montana, I had no idea where it would lead. What began as memoir has morphed into a historical fiction novel, with fictitious characters based on real people and events. I’ve always wanted to write a story with Butte
Lois Paige Simenson | Can We Really Go Home—And Write About It—Again? Read More »
Kathia Diamant is visiting Anchorage Sept. 24 – 28, 2016 through an author exchange program sponsored by Adventures by the Book. In partnership with the Alaska Writers Guild, 49 Writers is featuring these visiting authors in workshops at the AWG conference on Saturday, Sept. 24 and also at a members-only salon event on Sunday, Sept. 25 (details here). Prenzlauer
Kathi Diamant | Dispatch from Berlin: You’ve Got To Be There Read More »
“He says, narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. He says, the violence in the Odyssey is a story told afterwards, in a cave.” —Rachel Cusk, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation I find it difficult to write about the present day. Specifically, it’s been hard
49 Writers: Guest Blogger Lucian Childs | Writing and Nostalgia Read More »
In the last few months, Alaska has been brutal to people I know. A friend who’s so knowledgeable about the wilderness he teaches college classes on the subject got mauled by a bear on a mountain outside Haines. The outdoors-savvy boyfriend of a friend disappeared while running or hiking outside Nome. A bush pilot I
Last year I had a big poetry manuscript project that I was working feverishly on. This year, I knew that I would finish that project in the first quarter, and I worried that I might just stop writing. This is a common fear of writers, that the last thing we’ve written will be the LAST
Erin Hollowell: Haiku You Read More »
