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Product #: 4413
Price: $14.95
160 pages
Trade Paperback
6" x 9"
Memoir
20 B&W photos
Pub Date: 2003
ISBN: 0-9724944-1-3
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A Memoir John Foley didn't come to Alaska to teach. First, he was a newspaper reporter, but little in journalism prepares him to be a schoolteacher in rural Alaska, where he learns as much as he teaches and finds out what it means to be in the racial minority.
First, Foley teaches in the remote Yup'ik Eskimo village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. There, he and his unhappy wife are immersed in the Yup'ik culture. She feels lost and isolated, always the outsider, as they struggle to adjust. Later, divorced, a philosophical Foley moves far inland to teach and coach basketball in the Athabascan Indian village of Tetlin on the Alaska Highway near the U.S.-Canada border, where the length of a road trip is measured in days rather than hours. In Tetlin, he has given up women temporarily. Or perhaps they have given up on him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Foley is a high school teacher and basketball coach living in Everett, Washington. He worked as a newspaper reporter in the Chicago suburbs and in Alaska for nearly a decade, covering sports, police, features, and any other beat that didn't require him to attend sanitary sewer meetings. Foley left the Anchorage Times after two years to pursue a teaching career, and subsequently taught in the Yupik Eskimo village of Gambell and in the Athabascan Indian village of Tetlin. An avid traveler, Foley has hitchhiked through most of North America and western Europe. He married his second wife, Julie, in April 2002, and currently enjoys hiking in the Cascades and kayaking on Puget Sound.
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