Travel

One constant in my life, in my family’s history, really, has been travel. My grandparents on both sides were immigrants, from England, Finland and Germany. My parents were travelers, too. They met in Fairbanks, Alaska, around the end of World War Two. That’s where I was born and spent much of my childhood.

At one point, my parents owned a workingman’s hotel in Fairbanks, a two-story log building that styled itself “The Palace Rooms and Baths.” The tiny lobby of that hotel had large maps on the walls and stacks of “true adventure” magazines on the table. The trappers, prospectors and dog sled racers who stayed with us had their own tales of adventure, seemingly from all the horizons of the world. I think that’s where I was hooked.

At the Palace, travel and adventure were simply things that everyday people could do.

When I grew up, (which took me rather longer than it does for many people), I made my way back to Alaska, where I found a job as a disc jockey and later as a reporter at the public radio station in Bethel, KYUK. Public radio eventually led me to National Public Radio in Washington, DC. I worked at NPR as a newscaster, a reporter, and finally, as a foreign correspondent.

You can learn more about my career as a correspondent in the section called NPR Stories.

Writing Life

I’ve been writing stories at least since I was eleven. My tales then were modeled on the adventure stories in those magazines in the lobby of the Palace. Along the way I collected stacks of rejection slips (including some very nice vintage ones from magazines that are—alas!—no longer in business.) I wrote a couple of novels, too, before I was seduced away into the adventure of real news stories that occupied most of my career.

You can read some of my published stories in the sections marked Fiction In Print and Online.

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