University of Alaska Anchorage Low-Residency MFA Program

Trying to wrap my head around the concept that half the country doesn’t care about this.

‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian

This is from the Shepherd.com, a website for readers and book lovers. Zack Rogow is a poet, writer, playwright, and translator in San Francisco with more than twenty books to his name. Okay, complete disclosure: he's also a great friend.

Homer writers. Join Justin Herrmann and me for three Saturday morning workshops in FLASH MICRO-MEMOIRS. Very short personal essays about our animals and ourselves. Have a pet worth talking about? A squirrel in the roof? A bear in the chicken coop? Come on down. It'll be fun.

ATTENTION FACEBOOK FRIENDS (and other, old school flesh and blood friends):

Just a reminded that in conjunction with Alaska Book Week, sponsored by the Alaska Center for the Book, I’m going to be reading from my new short story collection, Uncommon Weather at Writers’ Block, our fine independent bookstore and café in Spenard.

Sunday evening at 6:00PM.

Beer, wine, food, and short stories. For some of us, it doesn’t get any better than that.

You there.

ABOUT ORDERING AND ATTEMPTING TO EAT THE FOOD IN THE U.K.

Eat only the lamb, beef, duck confit, or bacon, washed down with beer or ale and you’ll be fine. Until gout, cardiovascular disease, or colon cancer sets it.

Forget chicken. Welsh chefs seem unaware of juicy, flavorful chicken thighs, favoring skinless breasts, which they incinerate until any trace of moisture or flavor is obliterated. Frankly, I think it should be illegal to sell chicken or turkey breast meat for human consumption—in any country.

Eggs. Holy s**t, can those people f**k up eggs! Except for one really good fried egg sandwich, egg dishes of any kind were awful. Especially Eggs Benedict with poached eggs hard enough to use as golf balls. Egg yolk flowed in their natural viscous, semi-liquid state only when we cooked our own.

Salads: We kept getting sucked into ordering Caesars salads. The tasteless, watery mayonnaise they pass off as dressing seemed to contain no olive oil, no egg , no parmesan, no garlic, and definitely no anchovies. Maybe they think Caesar salad has something to do with the Romans, and they’re still holding a grudge about the invasion of the British Isles, circa AD 43. I mean it’s only been two thousand years.

Which brings me to pasta. NEVER, never, ever order pasta in the U.K.. Suffering from withdrawal symptoms after a week without any, I ordered linguine with prawns in the little fishing town of Treardur Bay. The mound of overcooked noodles on the plate was so thoroughly congealed, I could stick my fork into and lift the entire entangled mass intact. We ate exactly one good dish of silky, creamy pasta carbonara, the one I cooked on a Coleman stove in an outdoor kitchen at a farm cottage.

And then there are the bright green “mushy peas” which is a standard side dish with fish and chips. Lin dubbed them BFRBs (Baby Food Rejected By Babies).

So, when in doubt, get a pasty. They look awful. So, you can only be pleasantly surprised.

FFINAL DDISPATCH FFROM WALES.

My nerves are wrecked from driving on the wrong side of the road, but today we returned our car to the nice people at Enterprise Rentals with both mirrors attached and all four original tires. That’s after a complete clockwise circumnavigation of this lovely country--starting here in the far northwest, across the top to thirteenth-century Beaumarris, south to Hay on Wye (cutting through western England to avoid the mountains of Snowdonia), across the south to the seaside beach town of Tenby (avoiding Cardiff), and then up the west coast through Aberstywyth, out to the remote tip of the Llyn peninsula, and finally back here to the ferry terminal at Holyhead. Tomorrow, we sail for Dublin and then home to the States. Having bypassed much of the interior of Wales, I know nothing about it, but I’m guessing it’s mostly murderously narrow roads, endless miles of stone walls, and sheep. Lots and lots of sheep.
We’ve eaten the best lamb I’ve ever tasted anywhere, excellent baked cod loins, and superb smoked haddock on scrambled eggs. I’ve learned that the key to reasonably edible food in Wales—and maybe all of Great Britain—is to avoid “mushy peas,” and the words “beer battered and fried.” Jesus, it must be some kind of Celtic belief that anything made with BEER tastes better than anything without it. What a terrible thing to do to perfectly succulent lobster tails!
Thousand-year-old castles, spectacular seacoasts, and freakishly good weather (two days of rain in three weeks!) notwithstanding, the best things about Wales, far and away, are the friendly, kind, and generous people. It’s like Canada, without hockey and walleye pike fishing.
So, it’s been a terrific trip, but I’m going to be happy to be back to Homer, where sensible people drive on the right side of the road, and there are no f**king roundabouts!

DDISPATCH FROM WALES #2, ADDENNDUM
Hay on Wye, The Town That Books Built.
In response to my bibliophile friend Nancy Lord’s request, here’s a bit about the bookstores of Hay. In 1961, Richard Booth opened his first store here. Today there are about 30. The most famous, the beautiful Richard Booth Bookstore (the store is beautiful; I don’t know about the late Mr. Booth) is a three-story building that was once an industrial warehouse, now stuffed with apparently uncountable titles. I asked the front desk lady the total number, and a concerned look passed over her face. “Oooh,” she whispered, “I don’t think anyone knows.” She looked like she was afraid I was going to suggest counting them.
The hundreds of shelves are made of lustrous, furniture-quality wood, and the top floor features comfy stuffed sofas illuminated with sunlight from clerestory windows and skylights in the wooden ceiling, giving the whole place the feel of an English gentlemen’s reading room. Not that they’d ever let someone like me in one of those places.
Unlike gigantic franchise bookstores containing more calendars and greeting cards than actual books, Booth’s is almost all hardbound editions--although there are supplies for felting, sewing, and whatever it is people do with yarn. I got a kick out of a couple shelves of old English flyfishing books including ones with line drawing instructions for fly-tying, because that’s how I taught myself to tie flies more than 65 years ago.
I generally do not love big bookstores, preferring the teeny ones, like, say, the Homer Bookstore, or River City books in Soldotna. Knowing how long it takes anyone to write a book, it depresses me to see the careless way the massive stores treat them. Sometimes it looks like they’ve backed a truckload of the things in and dumped them as though they’re selling odd lot underpants.
In Booth’s, I got the feeling the staff carefully stocks each shelf, knowing that the eponymous Richard Booth himself is watching from up in bookseller heaven.

DDISPATCH FROM WALES II (dau)
Hay on Wye (Y Gelli Gandryll)

Holy s**t! Today I took the wrong turn of a lifetime. Trying to get to the Llanthony Priory in the hills above Hay on Wye, we missed the main road and ended up driving for almost an hour on a road that looked like it was last used by Druids. The so-called “lane” was about a foot wider than the rental car, hemmed in on both sides by walls of ancient hedges, ten feet high and dense enough to stop a Viking broadaxe. (I hope Enterprise doesn’t expect us to return this thing with the both mirrors on it.) It was so narrow, we had to stop to allow three intrepid hikers to shove their asses into the shrubbery to let us squeeze by. I think I may have run over some toes. “Sori!” (A handy Welsh word to know.)
At last, we broke out into sunlight, open grassland, and herds of Wale’s ubiquitous sheep, and I finally stopped whimpering. We were overjoyed—until that took us up onto nine more miles of equally narrow and shoulderless road, this time with a precipitous cliff dropping off several hundred feet on one side and sheep too stupid to get out of the way on the other. Coming upon two bike riders, we had to decide whether to drive them or ourselves into the sheep or off the cliff. That’s a lot of decision making when your nerves are already f**king shot.
Seriously, what makes travel in this country bearable are the fantastically friendly people. I mean, in some countries, the only people this demonstrably friendly are panhandlers, hookers, or time-share salesmen. (France doesn’t even allow them to be friendly.) There is no way we could’ve gotten this far here without the endless assistance of the locals, who now think that at least half of all Americans are dimwits—a conclusion I don’t think I’m entirely responsible for, given recent political polls.

Wales driving tip #1.
Always bring a helpful person with you in the car, i.e., someone who can pry your fingers off the steering wheel at the end of the day (and find ice cubes for your vodka).

DISPATCH FROM WALES
In only four nerve-strangling hours of driving in Wales today I learned how things here differ from both Italy and Mexico, two other foreign (to me) countries where I’ve stupidly agreed to drive recently. Fierce-eyed Sicilian drivers clearly intend to kill you at all times. While suicidal Mexican motorists are only trying to kill themselves, yet are more than willing to take you along as collateral damage. By comparison, Welsh drivers seem mentally stable, friendly, and unaggressive. Of course, by making you drive on the wrong side of the road through backwards roundabouts every mile or so with road signs written first in incomprehensible Welsh (Llianfrynach!) and then in English so that you have to slam on your brakes to figure out where the hell you are, you will surely be killed anyhow.
All in all, it was a terrifying drive, although in fairness, probably a lot scarier for my wife Lin sitting on the passenger side (where the f**king steering wheel should be!).
Then there were the tantalizing signs promising BADGERS, an animal I’ve never seen. According to pictures on Google, the British badger is a rather handsome black and white beast something like a small, well-groomed wolverine wearing a bespoke Saville Row suit. I’m intent on spotting one of the creatures. Alas, the only things I saw scurrying across the pavement today were small herds of consonants (mostly Ls, Ys, and Ns) that had apparently escaped from a Welsh road sign.
Somehow, we made it to Llanigon by midafternoon, having had only two or three mild nervous breakdowns along the way.
On the upside, I did learn a few new words. From Lin. Mostly with Fs and Ks in them.
World travel is so educational.

Today we’re in Hay on Wye, a picturesque little town full of art galleries and independent bookstores. It’s sort of like Homer….but with a castle instead of the Salty Dawg.

Uncommon Weather
Alaska Stories
Richard Chiappone, University of Alaska
Press (SEP 16) Softcover $19.95 (166pp)
978-1-64642-636-2
In Richard Chiappone’s dark and humorous short
story collection Uncommon Weather, people battle isolation, boredom, and existential anxiety.
These twelve intricate stories are set in
Alaska’s small towns and vast wildernesses and
explore deep isolation. There are empathetic
characters who are flawed and just shy of irredeemable; there are people with fresh wounds
whose futures seem dismal. Climate change and
infidelity cause existential insecurity too.
In the haunting story “Little Wing,” a bush
doctor misses her flight out of Anchorage and
is left to sit at a restaurant watching the waitstaff try to feed a fallen nestling; thousands of
miles away, her daughter’s funeral takes place in
Buffalo. In “Time on the Water,” a man moves
into his cabin on the Kenai Peninsula to fish his
remaining years away in the wake of an amicable
divorce and a terminal cancer diagnosis. There,
he develops an unexpected appetite for outlaw
life. In “Uncommon Weather,” an environmental
conservationist, disillusioned after years of dedication without impact, gives herself permission to
have an extramarital affair unhindered by shame.
The stories’ twists are a vicious combination
of unforeseeable and inevitable. Herein, even
formidable senses of humor come up short in
the face of brutal tragedies and harrowing discoveries. Still, most of the endings skew hopeful,
if lonely, with weighted optimism. This configuration is to a large extent shaped by the distance,
jobs, and wilderness recreation that’s unique to
Alaska’s geography, where relationships take on
new stresses and significance.
Marked by alienation and a dark sense of
humor, Uncommon Weather is a haunting collection of short stories about human burdens in
a far corner of the world.

Just got a copy of a review of buy new book of stories, Uncommon Weather published in Foreword, a magazine devoted to Indie Books and Publishing.