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.
Master hunting guide Hank Waters, a former Navy pilot, runs a wilderness lodge on the Alaska Peninsula. The opportunity of his career comes when Prince Tariq, the Crown Prince of Rahman, arrives in Alaska to hunt brown bear. Waters has always been ambivalent about guiding his wealthy clients to hunt the bears that he loves, and his fears are not groundless. Exploiting their privilege, the Prince’s men violate one law after another in a rising spiral of transgression. Can Hank Waters and his staff — Kim the young Aleut woman, Frenchy the irascible cook, Betty the victim of hopelessness — maintain order among so many men accustomed to having their way in the world? How far should Waters go to accommodate his guests in exchange for the money he will earn?
Sneaky Peek
Over their right shoulders, the fire was fountaining from Pavlof’s summit as the molten rock was ejected, and they turned and gazed that way, mesmerized by the sight, the sky glowing red over the volcano, the underlit hot gases blooming like night flowers from the crater until that lambency too yielded to the darkness. There were no stars or moon then and only the distant lodge broke the tundra desolation. They saw the lodge from several miles away, illumined in every window, a palace on the arctic prairie.
