Everyday Heroes

Last week the temperature dipped to 30 below—our first cold snap of the season. The sun was going to set soon, and besides cracking the door open to get a draft for the woodstove, I hadn’t had any fresh air all day. I do most of my writing on a treadmill so I’d had a [...]

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Riff Writing

A riff is an improvised solo—a musician going with the feeling of the moment to create some original music. Some riffs become part of a studio recording. Others live and die on the stage. A couple years ago I took a workshop with Elizabeth Lyon, and she introduced me to Riff Writing. I was pleasantly surprised by the results.  [...]

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Momentum

“Momentum is far more important than inspiration. Inspiration comes from momentum, from revisiting the manuscript every day.” Pam Munoz Ryan. I heard Pam speak at a conference several years ago. She is a prolific writer who has published close to twenty children’s books and a few adult titles, too. I wrote down her words as [...]

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Moose-on-the-Loose

Moose are huge. And outside my house, sometimes it seems like they appear out of nowhere. When I see a moose, I stop what I’m doing and pay attention. I almost always learn something new. Last winter I watched one gnaw on shell fungus that was growing on a birch tree. Several years ago I watched a [...]

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Setting: Through whose eyes do we see?

The Tanana River carves its way through birch forests and black spruce swamps. By Alaska standards it’s a pretty ordinary river: silty and swift, braided but no white-water, and glacial in its origins. I float parts of the Tanana every summer. A couple summers ago it was over eighty degrees and we had a tail [...]

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