An earlier version of this story appeared January 11, 2018, ECHO Magazine The luxurious Egan Library at the University of Alaska Southeast was completed while I lived in Juneau. This branch of the UA System has the best School of Education but many districts prefer to hire newly trained Outside teachers seeking their Alaska Adventure. …
A Legacy of North America’s Largest Mountain Some of us grew up knowing Mt. McKinley was the largest mountain in North America. It isn’t anymore; Mt. Denali is now the largest mountain in North America. So why was it named after the 25th President of the United States in the first place? According to an …
Previously published in Echo Magazine January 25, 2018 Donn Liston confronts Senator Rodey Few Alaskans bother to visit our state capital city where elected officials pass laws and conduct state business. There is good reason for this. Being a product of Southcentral Alaska myself, as a young man I wondered about what Juneau was like, and …
Adventures in Juneau–You cannot know how Alaska’s Capital works without going there. Read More »
My Alaska 1960’s Experience 2019–a group of the same students who always did this stuff, organized the 50th year reunion since my East Anchorage High School graduation occurred–but I didn’t attend. Those were not good years for me and I didn’t care to hear from many peers who are still stuck in the 60’s. I …
A Quality Resource Center in Mt View This writer spent some of my youth in an Anchorage that was a community of characters you might read about in good fiction, and as a young man I came to know a lot of them. As a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News during the mid-1970s I …
The notion of “family” was foreign to me as a child. Not until I took an Anchorage Community College class in Sociology did I understand that family is the building block of society. I remember being struck by that notion when I first heard it. The circumstance of my childhood determined my understanding of family …
A Refuge from Calamity: What Brought Me to Alaska Read More »
First Published January, 2016; A story from Gov. Dunleavy’s former Mat-Su Senate District. A new student in my Wasilla, Alaska, Adult Basic Education (ABE) class recently expressed wonder in how much he had progressed in just a few days of math study here, and, further expressing himself told of the public high school he had …
Alaska’s Government School Failure: What will it take to fix them? Read More »
Youthful Freedom and Fishing Disaster First published by ECHO Magazine, May 2019 I Learned about the magnitude of the Gulf of Alaska as a youth in Yakutat when my father decided we would take up commercial fishing. WWe lost everything; boat, nets and Dad could have lost his son. Commercial fishing is serious business in …
The Big One Sensitized Me! Update on story first appearing in ECHO Magazine, January 10, 2019 Living in a part of the world where earthquakes are a frequent occurrence requires an understanding of what causes them and how to deal with what results when the earth starts shaking violently. Much has been learned about earthquakes …
How to Think about Writing September 6, 2018 by Donn Liston (first published in echoak.com) Ship of State. Statehood group travels to Washington, D.C. in 1950 on board a DC4. Senator Gunnard Enebreth and Bob Atwood sit behind two unidentified women. B1990.014.5.StateBattle.2.21 Steve McCutcheon Collection, Atwood Resource Center, Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Anchorage, Ak. …
