I was sick for a good portion of my last three weeks in Yellowknife, so chances are pretty good that I owe you an email. Hang in there, I’m working on it.

What else? I have a profile coming out in the new Up Here Business, which should be on newsstands shortly. We published a 6000-word epic about rafting the Grand Canyon on World Hum this week. Over at Vela, Simone’s latest is a wonderful essay on unexpectedly becoming an army wife. And my friend Luke’s phenomenal story on the Joplin tornado won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing tonight!

Speaking of National Magazine Awards — Canadian edition — the nominees were announced earlier this week, and Up Here is up for four, including Best Single Issue. It’s an exciting publication to be a part of.

Lots of summer travel plans in Alaska, the Yukon and NWT. More to come!

In the April/May issue of Up Here, I wrote about the Yukon’s world-beating team of cross-country skiers: The Bigger They Come. And my second story, The New Gold Rush Kings, is on the cover of April’s Up Here Business – it’s not online (yet, anyhow) but you can see the cover here.

I’ve got lots more in the works for upcoming issues. Stay tuned.

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Thanks to The Daily Dish for the Lewis quote.

Check it out, and stay tuned for the rest!

Are you one of those people, too? Check these posts out:

How It Begins includes the actual email exchange that led to Jones landing the assignment for The Things That Carried Him, a 2009 National Magazine Award winner for feature writing.

Losing’s Reward is a brutally honest post about Jones’ Roger Ebert profile missing out on the National Magazine Award nominations, and Fear is about, well, the fear and doubt that infect the writing process.

NO lists 20 things that “should rarely if ever appear anywhere near your copy.”

Bonus link: Jones’ Esquire colleague Scott Raab also posted some writing advice on his site awhile back. This is the meat of it:

Writers love to write — and not because it’s easy. Getting it right isn’t easy at all, and that challenge is a big part of why writers love to write. It’s a high, working on your game, a way of being in the world that feels absolutely honest and true.

Anyone, especially in his or her twenties, saying ‘I have no time to write’ because of a job or anything else is full of crap. Writers write. If you can’t find time to write, don’t worry about becoming a writer. You’re not a writer. You’ll never be a writer. Find something else that lights you up.

Same with reading. Anybody who has no time to read isn’t a writer. All the work necessary to learn how to write boils down to reading and writing. This is not subtle or nuanced advice, obviously. I stress it here because of how often I talk to people who seem to think there’s a shortcut. I know no shortcuts.

He saved travel writing by changing its mandate: After Chatwin, the challenge was to find not originality of destination but originality of form.

Among those who have followed Chatwin, the most interesting have forged new forms specific to their chosen subjects: thus Pico Iyer’s sparkily hyperconnective studies of globalized culture and William Least Heat-Moon’s “deep maps” of America’s lost regions. Perhaps most important were W.G. Sebald’s enigmatic “prose fictions” — particularly Rings Of Saturn — that likewise hover between genres, make play with unreliability, and fold in on other forms: traveler’s tale, antiquarian digression, and memoir. What Sebald, like so many of us, learned from Chatwin was that the travelogue could voyage deeply in time rather than widely in space, and that the interior it explored need not be the heart of a place but the mind of the traveler.

(It’s from “Voyagers: The restless genius of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin,” by Robert Macfarlane, in the November 2011 issue.)

It’s a temporary position, a ten-month maternity leave fill-in, and I’ll be spending part of that time at the head office in Yellowknife, NWT. (The rest of the time I’ll be working here in Whitehorse.) I’m excited to get to know a second northern Canadian city, and to work on a pair of magazines that I really admire. I also think it’s going to be kind of cool to work in actual office, with actual people, for a little while at least.

I’ll still be doing some limited freelancing on the side, and of course I’ll be continuing to chime in at World Hum. The job itself is going to be writing-intensive, so keep an eye out for my byline in both mags. (And you can get a head start with the latest issue of Up Here Business, which includes my profile of local mushing legend Frank Turner of Muktuk Adventures.)

True Stories: I Fell for a Fictional Character in My Own Play.

Check it out!

Having trouble envisioning a 1000-mile dogsledding event? Here’s a fantastic video that my colleagues on the photo/video crew made at the start line:

I’ve written about the Quest before: I had a short essay in the October/November issue of Up Here magazine about my time at the Slaven’s Roadhouse dog drop station last year (unfortunately the piece is not online), and I also wrote my last Vela story about mushing and the Quest.