Tonight at 6 PST (that’s 5 in AK and you can figure out what it is where you are…) I will be talking to my old friend Sedge Thomson at The Booksmith via Zoom and live on FaceBook about Of Bears and Ballots. Sedge, along with his old West Coast Live! Radio show crew spent a lot of time at our house during their summer in Alaska tours and he even arrived once just before Christmas on the ferry with his son to see what Alaska felt and looked at winter solstice. He’s a great interviewer, so I’m especially looking forward to it.
Here’s something else about Sedge. Back when we first met I had not written any books, but I had published a lot of columns and done more radio essays. He said I should write a book, and I said I didn’t know how to and I didn’t have time. ( I was pretty busy making a lot of meals for his crew, and I had five children and three dogs…)He told me it’s easy. Just write a 1,000 words a day for 60 days and you have a book. That’s why when Amy Gash from Algonquin Books called me up after hearing a radio piece I did and asked me if I wanted to write a book, I said “yes!” (It took a little longer than 60 days…but the point is, that I wasn’t afraid to try it. Thanks to Sedge.)
Also, I wanted to thank poet Erin Coughlin Hollowell in Homer for hosting a really nice event “there” on Friday. Her books are Pause, Traveler and Every Atom. The first is sort of about (in as much as any poetry is “about” something so specific) a woman coming into her own, on her way (sort of) from NY to Alaska, and the second is a tribute to her mother and her dementia and death. Her poems are moving, rich, and very brave. In one called The Lesson she writes:
“I open the box of new day
to discover
a blessing
hours enough
for a thousand mistakes.”
