Author Tanyo Ravicz will return to his hometown to read from and discuss his new book ‘Ring of Fire and Other Stories,’ an Alaskan adventure novella and short stories set in the northernmost state. The 1979 Palisades High School grad will speak about his book on Thursday, March 31 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore. This is Ravicz’s first published book, although he has been writing fiction for 20 years and has been published in magazines and periodicals. Ravicz’s family bought their home on Castellammare in 1964. For 30 years, they owned the Barrymore house, so called because John Barrymore once lived there. ‘It was a great old place across from the beach,’ Tanyo recalls. After PaliHi, Ravicz studied literature at Harvard University and graduated in 1984. A few years later, he and his wife-to-be Martina settled in Alaska. While living in Alaska, Ravicz was writing and immersing himself in local activities, such as fishing and hiking. He worked as a substitute teacher during the year, and as an emergency firefighter during the summer, and also spent time working in the fishing industry. His writing was informed by the many different characters he met. ‘There’s a different variety of people you get at the extreme end of the empire’less varnished, less smoothed down by education.’ ‘Ring of Fire’ was inspired by an article Ravicz read about a Saudi crown prince who traveled to Alaska to hunt brown bears, just after the Gulf War. ‘It caught my imagination: the collision of the two worlds,’ Ravicz says. In the novella, Prince Tariz, the crown prince of the Islamic monarchy of Rahman, arrives with his entourage to hunt at the wilderness lodge of Hank Waters, a reclusive master hunting guide. The tension builds as the Rahman entourage, accustomed to having their way, violate hunting laws in the Alaskan wilderness, and Waters and crew see how far they will go to accommodate them. The six stories are of modern Alaskan characters from all walks of life, many exploring romantic relationships. Many of the stories had been previously published in Bellowing Ark, a literary journal. Bellowing Ark, a small press in Washington state, also published his book. When Tanyo’s wife, Martina, became tired of the cold, they moved to Palm Springs, where she set up her law practice. The couple and their two children, Miranda, 12, and Kody, 7, continue to spend their summers on 15 acres on Kodiak Island, land which Ravicz had homesteaded. Ravicz cites many literary influences’Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Maugham, Bellow, Steinbeck and Jack London. As far as what inspires him, Ravicz says ‘something triggers me, it comes out of something in my soul. Something you witness, hear, smell or recall fills you with a sense of relevance. Everybody has those experiences: writers just crawl away and scribble it down.’ Ravicz says writers explore ‘aspects of human nature that haven’t been explored before.’ He has received praise from authors Thomas Keneally, who compared the book to Styron’s first novel [‘Lie Down In Darkness’], and Judith Grossman, who said he ‘weaves his own way between Faulkner and Hemingway.’ Ravicz met Keneally and Grossman when he was briefly enrolled in the writing program at UC Irvine. Ravicz is currently working on a nonfiction essay as well as a ‘West Coast novel,’ which tells the story of a Mexican Indian migrant worker and his journey from Mexico to Alaska.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
