Tom Kizzia hasn't just observed and written about Alaska for three-plus decades, he's lived it. 'Pilgrim's Wilderness' is a story that needed to be told by the only man who could tell it.
El Paso is the final Wild, Wild West city.
The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.
We were soon free of the woods and bushes, and fairly upon the broad prairie.
When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, 'Why?'
I found myself drawn to the remote Kimberley region of Australia - in the far Northwest corner of the country - our last frontier. I still can't explain why. I kept coming back over many years and started shooting material.
New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.
I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.
