Author Pete Fromm visits Winslow book shop

Published 11:40 am Friday, October 14, 2016

Island book lovers are invited to break bread and chat with award-winning author Pete Fromm when he visits Eagle Harbor Book Company to talk about his new memoir “The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds,” as part of the ongoing Brown Bag Lunch Series, at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14.

At 20-years-old, Fromm heard of a job babysitting salmon eggs. It meant seven winter months alone in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Leaping at this chance to be a mountain man, with no experience in the wild, he left the world. Thirteen years later, in 1993, he published his beloved memoir of that winter: “Indian Creek Chronicles.”

Twenty-five years later, he was asked to return to the wilderness to babysit more fish eggs. But no longer a foot-loose 20-year-old, at 45 he was the father of two young sons. He left again, alone, straight into the heart of Montana’s Bob Marshall wilderness, walking a daily 10-mile loop to his fish eggs through deer and elk and the highest density of grizzly bears in the lower 48 states.

“The Names of the Stars” is not only a story of wilderness and bears, but also a trek through a life lived at its edges, showing how an impulsive kid transformed into a father without losing his love for the wilds. From loon calls echoing across Northwood lakes to the grim realities of life guarding in the Nevada desert, through the isolation of Indian Creek and years spent running the Snake and Rio Grande as a river ranger, Fromm seeks out the source of this passion for wildness, as well as explores fatherhood and mortality and all the costs and risks and rewards of life lived on its own terms.

Fromm is a five-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for his novels “If Not For This,” “As Cool as I Am,” and “How All This Started,” his story collection “Dry Rain,” and the memoir “Indian Creek Chronicles.” The film of “As Cool as I Am” was released in 2013. He is also the author of four other story collections and has published more than 200 stories in various magazines. He is on the faculty of Oregon’s Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program and lives in Montana.