Greetings fellow phrenologists, friends, and football fans:


I thought I'd share with you a recent article from the Anchorage Press. It's a brief little story about me - mostly I thought you'd enjoy the photo of my office.

I hope this reaches all of you in health and happiness. If not, have a laugh at my expense and maybe you'll feel a little better.

Here's the link to the site:
http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives-2006/thisalaskanlifevol15ed10.shtml

I also received what will probably be my first (hopefully not the last!) acknowledgement in a book that will nodoubt be on the New York Times Best Seller list - it's in the foreward to Jodi Picoult's latest book, the Tenth Circle. Jodi was kind enough to give props to my sweet wife Annette, my cuz Rich and his Jen, and myself. Check it out - the book is good (even if it has a few scenes somewhat similar to the life of yours truly!).

If you really want to read about her book, here is an interview from newsday.com:

That's it for now! Take care - keep reading, keep writing, keep living and loving.

Don



"To Alaska and back"

Jodi Picoult is another Long Island-reared author, and whenever she returns for a book signing, she draws big crowds.

"At the beginning, it was friends and family," Picoult says. "Now, it's mostly strangers." A Friday morning event in East Hills for her 13th novel, "The Tenth Circle," is sold out. Her grandparents, who are in their 90s, will travel from their Bayside home to attend, she says.

Then, she'll spend the afternoon at her childhood home in Nesconset, and her parents will take Picoult, who now lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children, to Huntington's Book Revue.

As is common for her, Picoult has chosen a provocative subject. A 14-year-old girl reports that she has been date-raped, which sets off a chain of events that lead her father, a comic book artist, to return to Alaska, where he grew up as the only white boy in an Eskimo village. Picoult says she learned about the social customs of today's teens through her children's baby-sitters. She found much of it disturbing, including the practice of casually hooking up and the objectification of young women.

"We're basically turning out an entire generation of kids who don't know how to have a relationship," Picoult says.

For the Alaskan sections, her research was more far-flung: She visited the tundra and, with the help of Don Rearden - a young man she met when she spoke at the University of Alaska in Anchorage - worked at a dogsled race as a checker. "That means standing out in the middle of the river, at 38 degrees below without the wind chill, with a clipboard. When the teams check in, you radio in their time."

What was she wearing? Layers of clothes, including Moon Boots and a beaver fur hat. "Everything at once. And I still had to borrow clothes." Later, Rearden took her by snowmobile to small villages in the Alaskan bush. "I stole mercilessly from his life," for childhood experiences of her novel's father.

She learned, she says, that Eskimos believe that "what you think is just as important as what you say out loud. Imagine how beautifully that fits into a book about date rape and whether or not she said no."

Picoult also decided to include graphics drawn by the fictional father (similar to the way Goodman used her husband's poems). She hired an artist, Dustin Weaver, who lives in California. She sent him instructions, and he responded with images via e-mail. "He hadn't seen the novel," she says. About two months in, he revealed that he, too, had grown up in Alaska. Picoult calls it "a bizarre twist of fate."