Word: points
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Like a very large proportion of Alaska's present population, the assistant district attorney of the Fairbanks Borough is from "outside" (as Alaskans call any ??lace beyond their borders). His name is Tom, and he's a Texan whose first ambition was to go to West Point and whose second ambition was to be a big-league baseball player. He didn't succeed at either of these, so he ended up first in Texas law school and then in the Fairbanks D. A. office. Tom doesn't like the moral atmosphere of Fairbanks-("For its size...
Perhaps Fairbanks can still claim to be on the edge of the last American frontier-it's the largest settlement in the Alaskan interior, the last real town before the roads end, the jumping-off point for the development of the Prudhoc Bay oilfields to the North. There are still a few old log houses on the main streets of town. But more conspicuous are the new housing developments where small kids ride bicycles with high-rise handlebars and long seats like the ones on their older brothers' Hondas and Harleys; more conspicuous are three perfectly-manicured Little League fields...
...Northern Lights. "They're just like big colored curtains," he explained, "with big pieces cut out of them." There was one thing about the Northern Lights, though, that impressed even him. "One night I was standing with my mother in front of our house. She's from Point Barrow-and she said she remembered a legend she'd heard about the Northern Lights. It said that if you chanted these certain words, the lights would get brighter. So she said these words, it sounded like mumbles to me, 'mboo hom mom,' or something, I don't understand Eskimo language...
Barbara bakes whole-grain sourdough bread every day; she has a small garden, and wild peas and berries grow on the point, Lance can skin and butcher a moose so that almost all the meat is steak; they keep their yearly moose in a friend's freezer in town. In the summer, fresh salmon, shrimp and crab are easy to come by in Homer...
...writing that he's done- "Graduate writing courses are mainly concerned with teaching people how to teach other people how to write. They get involved in the question of whether it's really possible for a writer to communicate, and things like that. When they get to that point, they're not going to get anywhere. I had to getaway from a lot of what I've learned in writing courses when I wrote my book, and concentrate instead on how to tell a good story well. Writers today get so involved with other things that it's hard...