INSPIRED BY ALASKA
Born in Mexico City, brought up in L.A., Tanyo graduated from Harvard University in 1984 and eventually wound up in Alaska, homesteading on Kodiak Island.
Alaska is a huge and humbling place of simple but boundless fascination, of mystery and unfinished creation, and although Tanyo Ravicz didn’t set foot here until he was twenty-five, the place has held an off-the-road, over-the-horizon attraction for him since grade school.
In his writing, the settings are often Alaskan, not only in the natural surroundings, but, crucially, in the story lines which the settings make possible. Alaska has fundamentally conditioned Ravicz’s style of realism.
Don’t tell…but Tanyo is addicted to Alaska.
Although he didn’t set foot in Alaska until he was twenty-five, the place has held an off-the-road, over-the-horizon attraction for him since grade school.
The Confessional
We asked & our authors answered…
Tanyo has been known to…tell a lie if the truth is meaner
Things Tanyo likes…tandoori red, scents of rose and orange blossom, anise, pistachio, sound of skis in snow, breaking waves and murmuring voices, bare feet in the moss, blue notes and firm ripenesses, a berry bursting on the tongue, birdsong
He’ll never get caught…having nothing to write about but the angst of being a writer having nothing to write about in a world that doesn’t give a rat’s whisker whether you write about having nothing to write about or not.
A favorite/line expression and where it’s from: “If you can take it you can make it.” Unbroken
Alaskans he most admires: Sydney Laurence, Norman Vaughan, Howard Rock
Favorite Alaska places: Chena River, Kupreanof Peninsula, Alyeska
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Description
Born in Mexico City and brought up in L.A., Ravicz graduated from Harvard University in 1984. After living on the East Coast and in Europe, he moved to Alaska, homesteading on Kodiak Island, where he returns every summer. Alaska fired his passion for the natural world and became a focus of his writing.
Sneaky Peek
It’s like living in two worlds, man. I got this uncle who’s a total bush rat, lives out on the river past Eagle, trapping and cutting wood and—real traditional life, you know? Soon as I come back from dive school in San Diego, I go out in the bush and live with him and fish with him and it’s weird cause they got all those malls in San Diego and tons of people and cars and you come back and it’s so different, quiet and peaceful with trees all around.
