launching

I’ve just published my novel Raven, Tell A Story on Amazon (paperback and Kindle). I started it twenty years ago and it’s seen many iterations over the years; I’m grateful to the friends who have read it along the way and offered feedback, and so happy to finally send it out!

Raven, Tell A Story isn’t set in an actual place, but if you’ve ever flown in to Anchorage, Alaska, on a clear day and were sitting at a window on the right side of the jet, you were looking down on the place––pretty much. The islands of Prince William Sound, and then the tall mountains of the Kenai Peninsula to the west and line after line of the white Chugach mountains reaching off to the east, with the small port of Whittier passing below, and then Turnagain Arm, and looking down on the Girdwood Valley and the pure white of the Eagle glacier smoothing off to the north… well, it brings me to tears pretty much every time I see it.

So when I sat down about four years ago to completely rewrite this story, one last time, this was the setting I picked for it. But because being an author is a tiny bit like being God, I was able to make a few improvements (at least in my mind!). Anchorage became the setting for Fayerport, but Turnagain Arm and Knik Arm both became deep, clear bays, and the long gray inlet leading past the Kenai peninsula, with the Alaska Range across the water from Anchorage, disappeared… so that Fayerport now faced nothing but sea to the west, open ocean all the way to Kamchatka. And Tessa’s lake is one valley up from that bay that used to be silty, gray Turnagain Arm, and a valley or two west of the Girdwood valley. That seemed just about the perfect location for it.

The photo of the lake and the mountain on the cover of the book (and on the Home page of this website) is actually from the Yukon. If you’ve ever driven from Haines to Haines Junction, I’m sure you noticed Kathleen Lake, sitting just off the highway, nestled between two mountains that love to reflect in its quiet water. This is one of the world’s most beautiful places, as beautiful to me as the Chugach mountains near Girdwood, and it looks pretty much the same, so if you want to keep that image in your mind as Tessa’s lake, that would be fitting.