I live on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in a house on a cliff over the salty North Pacific waters of the Gulf of Alaska. The windows in my writing room, washed by hard-spray winds, stand watch over loons, coveys of sea ducks and two pairs of bald eagles who ride the cliff's updrafts to the eaves over my head. Sometimes they are the fierce muse that I need as I sit searching for the words that belong in the next essay or book-but often, as they stand on the spire of rock stripping the guts of a salmon or a murre for their meal, I watch, still astonished, all words lost. Every summer, since 1978, I move to another island off the west coast of Kodiak Island, near Larsen Bay, where my husband and I and our six children are the island's only inhabitants. Here, on Harvester Island, we work in an extended family fishing operation, Fields' Wild Salmon in an intensive four month season of commercial salmon fishing. My life is defined by these two island geographies, but not confined by their boundaries. In the 1980's, I traveled via expedition truck, double-decker bus, backpack and local transport  throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia, S.E.

Asia, and Africa. Currently I travel and speak throughout North America (and this winter, Central America as well) at conferences, seminars and retreats on matters of faith, literature, the integration of faith and learning, wilderness and nature writing, family relationships, and the writing life. As a faculty mentor, I teach Creative Nonfiction in Seattle Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts program, the only MFA program in the country rooted in an exploration of the nexus of faith, art and mystery.  Between my own teaching and writing, I also run a professional writing business, The Northern Pen, performing manuscript critique, mentoring and editing in all stages of creative, professional, and academic writing. Through the threads of my own improbable and seemingly divergent life---a life in the Academy, in wilderness, in ocean harvesting, in publishing, speaking, and mothering---it is Language that has gathered each strand, binding and braiding to a single cord. It is Language that is uniquely performative, leading to discoveries of new truths--and new selves--in the midst of inherited assumptions, consuming demands, and challenging geographies. Through writing, I find not only a way of saying, but a way of living: when wilderness, work, the chaos of culture divide me from myself and others, the call to words and Word brings the means and power to forge cohesion, to literally construct a linguistic lattice between nature, spirit, and body, all that feels disparate.