Driving the Alaska Highway

Within months of the Pearl Harbor bombing on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States, in cooperation with the Canadian authorities, set out to build a highway from British Columbia to Alaska, then a territory and viewed as vulnerable to attack by Japan. The original 1,685-mile road took more than 10,000 soldiers less than nine months…

Korean Fried Chicken to Save Your Sunday

Good morning. The weekends have been filled with frustration lately, all kinds of broken things that need to be fixed before anything fun can happen: the frost-killed hose bib out front; the 30-amp fuse in the hydraulics on the skiff; the shorted-out taillight on the trailer beneath it. That’s often the way of the world:…

How I Met My Father

Fathers don’t fare well in my fiction. They are white supremacist killers and domestic abusers. They trick their wives into becoming pregnant. They have affairs. They abandon their families. My biological father, Albert Coleman Bryan Jr., was 22 when I was born. He was a dashing air force pilot who flew off into the wide…