King\’s English Author Party
Posted on October 28th, 2008 by Bill Kerig
Title: King\’s English Author Party
Location: The King\’s English
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2008-12-04
Title: King\’s English Author Party
Location: The King\’s English
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2008-12-04
Okay, so that’s a bit of an overstatement. Or perhaps it’s just preliminary. The truth is, in our first real week in operation, this site has seen visitors from India to New Zealand, France to Finland, and lot of folks from The Netherlands. I don’t know why or how, but I’m so glad you’ve all joined me, if only for 2:37 minutes (your average visit — I’m hooked on Google Analytics, if you can’t tell) at The Edge of Never. It started off a bit lonely around here, but lately I’ve been thrilled to meet so many kindred spirits. I’ve begun email correspondences with every person who’s bought a book from my site, a practice I plan to continue. Depending on your perspective, you may either view that as a promise or a threat.
Several of you have asked about the progress on the movie version of the book. While I wish I could say that we are enjoying faceshots of pure money-love, the fact is that the current economic slide has temporarily buried our funding prospects. Yet we’re out there with the beacon and probe and shovel, digging hard for any passionate investors who are still sucking air. Meanwhile, check out the teaser we’ve posted on the MOVIE page. More to come, we promise. Sooner or later even the most massive slides will melt away…
In only a few hours I’ll be standing in front of what I hope will be a sizeable audience endeavoring to entertain them and introduce my book. I’m nervous and pumped! It feels like I’m competing again. Cool. Here’s the launch flier that my friends and family have been plastering the city with.
Fans of The Week or other just-the-straight-dope news sources will appreciate the clear and succinct writing found in Expedition News, a mostly print monthly review of significant expeditions, research projects and newsworthy adventures. Now in its 14th year, it’s distributed online to media representatives, corporate sponsors, educators, research librarians, explorers, environmentalists, and outdoor enthusiasts.
Visit the site, check out the current issue and E.N. archives, and subscribe to the monthly newsletter at http://www.expeditionnews.com,
Utahn Mathew Turley is doing some of the best outdoor adventure photography I’ve seen. Combining an artist’s eye with a adventurer’s spirit, Turley’s shots place the human in context with nature in a way that nicely captures the feeling of imminent action. It helps that Turley is himself an accomplished climber and backcountry skier. Featured in the last segment of a film that I was involved in, last season’s Sony Pictures Classic release of Steep (http://www.sonyclassics.com/steep/), he has the dubious distinction of being the only one in the film who cusses. Then again, he had good reason, he and his friends Dylan Freed and Andrew McLean had just been caught in an avalanche in remote Iceland.
He’s recently surrendered the canyons of New York for the peaks of Utah. Welcome back, Mathew.
To see some beautiful photography go to http://www.matthewturley.com. To read about how he does it, go to: http://matthewturley.com/blog/
Every month the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization that includes 2,200 independent book stores in the U.S., chooses what it thinks are the best bets for books released that month. The group has chosen The Edge of Never for its November 2008 list. Here’s a copy of the email I received.
Summer is not yet officially over, but indie booksellers definitely have their minds on Fall, and have declared their choices for the next great group of handsells. I’m pleased to share with you that the following title distributed by IPG has been designated as Indie Next List Notables for November, and will appear as a line listings in the printed flyer and on www.indiebound.org, as well as with jacket image and full bookseller quote in a downloadable PDF file to be posted on www.bookweb.org. The bookseller quotes for the Notables titles will also be available as downloadable shelftalkers on www.bookweb.org.:
THE EDGE OF NEVER: A Skier’s Story of Life, Death, and Dreams in the World’s Most Dangerous Mountains, William Kerig, Stone Creek Publications, 9780965633840/0965633845, $15.95
Congratulations!
It’s not easy to write a feature story for a ski magazine that has relevance to and resonance in the mainstream, non-adventure world but Tom Bie has does it in the October 2008 issue of Powder magazine. At Ease takes us to the Edelweiss Lodge in Garmisch West Germany, one of five Armed Forces Recreation Centers that the U.S. Government maintains for inexpensive R&R use by active service men and women. There we meet soldiers who’ve been serving in scorching Iraq who are now rejuvenating on the slopes of the Bavarian Alps.
Early in the story there’s a dark anecdote about the death of a family man on the day before he was to come home for a birthday cruise with his wife. The Sergeant who Bie is interviewing wears a black bracelet on his wrist in memory of this man. This black reminder and other shades of darkness are expertly woven through story (Hitler even makes an appearance) in a way that heightens Bie’s first-person anecdotes of finding fine powder stashes in the dark trees of Bavaria’s Black Forest.
There’s a quote from the commander of a Blackhawk helicopter squadron in which he talks about the relief of being in the mountains and in the snow of the Alps after suffering 131-degree heat in Iraq. Reading it makes you feel how lucky we all are to be able to spend time doing something as magical as sliding down snow-covered hills. Life, we are reminded, is rarely this good.
For me the piece had a bit of extra juice as my dad has talked for 40 years about the leave he spent skiing in this very place while he was in the Air Force. If I had a dollar for every time I heard him tell stories of the Zugspitze, I could retire and bore the pants off my own kids full time. In fact I’d heard about it so much that in my mind Zugspitze had taken on a fairy tale reality, existing in some netherworld of your old man’s glory days. Bie’s story gave it a new, present-day reality for me, and yet within the piece I could see that from a soldier’s perspective Zugspitze might also seem too good to be true.
Bie’s piece closes with the commander looking from the ski lodge back toward his imminent redeployment in Iraq. His quote reminds me of the flip side of being so happy in the mountains, especially when you’re with family (he’s with his mom and brother): it’s hard to come back down to the flatlands.
Kudos to Powder for biting on this story and to Bie for doing executing it so well. One gripe, it doesn’t seem to be online anywhere. Or maybe I’m missing it. If you know where to find it, please comment here.
Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn travel, first by train and then four-wheel drive, to the place where Chris McCandless, the character in Krakauer’s Into The Wild, walked into the Alaskan bush to live and die in a bus. The piece is well done (by the Sundance Channel for its Iconoclasts series) and illuminates the similarities between Penn and Krakauer. You come to see how much Penn cared for this story and how lucky Krakauer was to have him write the script and direct the film.
In an hour this site goes live and with it my blog. In front of me, in an application called Word Press, a great white space yawns. The empty page. Yesterday I watched an interview with writer Jon Krakauer on You Tube (he’s on a train with Sean Penn in Alaska, posted below) in which he said that he does not enjoy writing. “I just can’t get those f#^&ing first words on the page” he says. I’ve heard many writers describe the empty page as terrifying, as their worst nightmare.
For me it’s different. The first page is an endless field of untracked powder, a limitless expanse of opportunity. My first words, like your first turns in powder, are seldom any good. They’re just a way to build up rhythm, to get the muscles moving, to find the speed and the float to let go and allow something inside, something that doesn’t think but rather feels, take over. That’s when the good turns and the good writing can start. And if what I lay down sucks, well, there’s always the wind or another storm to fill in my tracks, or the delete key.
The sheer volume of the Internet also tends to snow under even the best of work. So, that’s what I’ll dig out for you on this blog. On it I’ll post work by outdoor writers and photographers and filmmakers who are laying down fresh lines that deserve to be re-recognized, and remembered. In between the outstanding work of others I’ll also keep a running dialogue of my own adventures in the worlds of words and film and mountains.
Please feel free to comment at any time. You can also contact me directly and privately at williamakerig@theedgeofnever.com. While I reserve the right to post a response to your emails on my blog, I will never reveal your identity on the blog without your permission.