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In 1775, Don Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra first spotted Southeast Alaska’s premier volcano from his ship Sonora and wrote that there was a mountain “of the most regular an [...]

This photo collage is long overdue, dear readers, but many thanks for your emails and social networking these past few weeks that have made those late-night posts all the more doable. Alaska is [...]

One sentence announces the possibility of the next. You get one God-given sentence for every story you write. The rest you have to chisel on your own. Work from a first line you can believe in. [...]

Friday morning, I woke early to blue-infused blackness–dawn in Sitka. Ravens called, snow unfurled across the campus walkways like a blanket, and I breathed deeply strolling down to the [...]

A big part of being Writer-in-Residence for The Island Institute is participating in public events. If you missed my 10-minute Raven Radio interview upon arriving in Sitka, that’s archived [...]

Don’t try to do the math on this one, but if you want to get a sense for just how many inlets and bays there are in Southeast Alaska, consider this: the panhandle of Southeast Alaska is [...]

It somehow escaped me on this most recent leg of my journey to post photos of the writer-in-residence digs. Over the past 25 months I’ve stayed in houses, off-the-grid cabins, residence [...]

Where did time go on this island? Caught up in “old man’s beard” as it dangles from these hemlocks? Eddying in whorls of ancient wood? Creeping down veins of moss? History [...]

Thanks to the helpful Directors at The Island Institute, on Friday I got to tour the Seafood Producers Cooperative (SPC) fish packing plant. It’s winter, which is prime time for [...]

Hark! There be sunshine alighting on this island! And so it goes, that when the clouds part all tasks must come to rest and any good Sitkan must attend to the opportunities immediately at hand: [...]