Mark Trahant shares his insights at the next Fields End workshop.

With a mythology as expansive as the region itself, the West offers no lack of stories for those with skill in their telling.

So when he was writing for the Arizona Republic, Mark Trahant created a beat that took him well beyond the newspaper’s circulation area.

Pretty much everything this side of the Mississippi was fair game.

“I am inspired by stories,” said Trahant, an island resident who now serves as editorial page editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. “I love hearing something that takes me to another place or time and helps me understand.

“I think the power of stories is the most important thing we share as a culture.”

Trahant will speak at the Field’s End writers roundtable Tuesday. He will address “Why Write Every Day,” a primer on strategies for getting ideas onto the page and refining them for print.

For the career journalist, inspiration comes from the love of a good tale and “the immediacy of writing about something that happened yesterday.”

Trahant entered the field earlier than most, publishing a neighborhood newsletter at age 8.

At 19, he was editor of the Sho-Ban News, a tribal newspaper on Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock reservation where he grew up.

It was an unusually challenging assignment, given often conflicting interests between the readers’ desire to know and the more narrow concerns of the tribal council that ran the press.

That burnishing experience, coupled with an innate understanding of tribal affairs, has informed his subsequent work.

At the Republic, his frank reportage on the shortcomings of federal Native American policy earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

“I tend to think that the more information that comes out, the more good stuff bubbles up,” he said.

Trahant’s career has since carried him to reportage and editorial posts with Navajo Times Today in Arizona, the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah and Idaho’s Moscow-Pullman Daily News.

His Native American heritage has informed his journalism in other ways perhaps unforeseen.

The P-I’s editorial page has been generally skeptical of the Iraq enterprise, at least in part because of Trahant’s understanding of tribal dynamics – currently playing out in violent and tragic fashion between warring Sunni and Shiite factions – that were overlooked in Washington D.C. at the dawn of the conflict.

“I don’t think there was much discourse about the role of tribal culture in Iraq,” he said. “It’s easy to misread a region if you don’t understand the tribal issues involved.”

While these days a fixture on the P-I’s editorial page, Trahant is creating a growing body of work more discursive than persuasive.

He is the author of “Pictures of Our Nobler Selves,” a look at the history of Native American journalism. He also contributed to “The Whole Salmon,” a multi-disciplinary project that explored the natural and cultural history of Salmon River.

The latter work gave him the chance to share with sons Marvin and Elias, now ages 14 and 11, his memories of growing up on the river.

Trahant’s next project will also explore native issues, an area where the writer’s personal interests and a certain paucity in the field of studies coincide.

Tentatively titled “Peace Chiefs,” the book will look at leading Native American figures of the 20th century, from Washington conservationist Billy Frank, Jr., to musician and social activist Buffy Sainte-Marie.

His fieldwork has taken him from the National Archives in Washington D.C. to the Native Press Archives in Arkansas, proving that the author’s real challenge can be finding time for research.

“Writing’s the easy part – I just get up early,” he said.

Indeed, for the aspiring writer, Trahant really has just one piece of advice: write. Lofty expectations, he says, can serve as a barrier to getting anything done. Put some ideas on the page – “shoot for failure instead of success, in his words – and then you can move on to refinement.

“It’s the re-writing that’s the joy,” he said.

Trahant’s authorial voice can be heard most distinctly through his regular, signed P-I column.

In the newspaper’s authoritative editorial space, what may sound to the reader like one voice is actually the aggregate of many on the editorial board.

“We all have issues we pay attention to and gain a level of expertise in,” Trahant said.

How long that collective voice will be heard is an open question. The Hearst-owned P-I is trying to fend off an attempt by the Blethen/Knight-Ridder-owned Seattle Times to end the joint operating agreement that has linked the newspapers’ business operations since 1983.

The issue has gone to binding arbitration, with a decision due by April. A Times victory could lead to the sale or dissolution of the smaller P-I.

Trahant says he’s too busy and having too much fun with his job to dwell on the newspaper’s possible fate.

“And what ever happens is out of my control anyway,” he says.

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The view west

Island author and Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorialist Mark Trahant speaks at the Field’s End writers roundtable, at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Bainbridge Library. The event is free.