Journalist, teacher pens new books

MAT-SU — After a long career as a journalist in Bush Alaska, Valley resident Philip Dunne has used his carefully honed storytelling skills to pen two new books.

In “Stebbins Stories” and “The Bering Straights,” Dunne shares some of his experiences using his more than 14 years teaching school in Stebbins.

He will sign copies of his new books at 11 a.m., Aug. 24 at Fireside Books in Palmer during the Alaska State Fair Parade.

A former journalist, Dunne said he covered city council and school board meetings for The Nome Nugget for a brief time in 1975, before launching and editing The Bering Straights newspaper for nearly five years, from February 1976 to December 1980. Next, he taught school in Stebbins for the Bering Strait School District from 1984 to 1999.

Dunne describes “Stebbins Stories” as a loose-knit collection of stories and memoirs that are complemented by color photographs. Topics in the book include grass basketry and ivory carving, Native Youth Olympics and wrestling, falconry, hunting and fishing, Yup’ik dancing and elders, among others.

“The Bering Straights” traces the newspaper industry’s history in the region where more than 20 newspapers have published since gold was discovered in Nome in 1898, he said.

Only the Nome Nugget survived longer than the Bering Straights Record, a weekly newspaper Dunne founded that covered news in the region from 1976 to 1982, according to a press release about the book.

The 360-page book also includes a 54-page section titled “Native Life: as Portrayed in the Pages of a Newspaper, 1900 to 1975,” which ran as an 18-week series in 1981, giving a good historical background for the area since the “stampede” at the turn of the century that brought more than 20,000 fortune-seeking non-Natives to its once vacant beaches. This book has been well received in Nome and the Bering Strait area.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or

heather.resz@frontiersman.com.