Best Pics from Life on the Road, 2010

By mid-August 2010 I was packed and ready to go to Alaska for six weeks. I left my car with a buddy in Michigan, hopped on the plane, and set forth having one of greatest times of my life. Karen Button, a fellow writing friend and former foreign war correspondent, agreed to travel to Fairbanks, AK with me (from her hometown of Anchorage). In her friend’s solar powered, rain-water fed tiny cabin off a trail off the road off the highway, we wrote and critiqued our work daily for three weeks. With about 20 hours of daylight on our side, we could stay at the desk all day and still get a good hike or bike ride in each evening. We usually took dinner late, around 10pm, and enjoyed breathtaking sunsets from the view of our sauna porch. We celebrated the end of our hard work by hosting a public reading in Fairbanks, then heading out for 5 days of bushwacking backpacking in the White Mountains a few hours north.

After Fairbanks, I spent three weeks in Denali with another writing friend Shannon, her husband Peter, and their sweet little son Sam. The tail end of their vacation was the beginning of my home-made solo residency, and as they left their cabin in my hands for a few weeks I missed their company but couldn’t have felt more grateful for the opportunity they gave me. As it turns out, the time with Karen and later the time in Shannon’s cabin turned out to be the single-most productive writing time of my entire life. I wrote over half of the war stories for my forthcoming book Flashes of War during that time and now it looks like Shannon and I will enjoy simultaneous book launches Spring 2013. I was lucky enough to preview parts of Shannon’s book, North of Hope, which I can’t wait to hold in my hands.