Don’t let the title of Tyler Dempsey’s latest book, Denali, Alaska, fool you. That may sound like the name of a travelogue or guidebook, but this collection of essays, now out from Trident, is as expansive as the state he called home for more than a decade.
Yes, there are plenty of first-person accounts of Tyler’s adventures in the wilds of The Last Frontier, including a stint as a backpacking guide for a Belgian film crew to the site of a famously doomed American adventurer (the subject of the book’s penultimate essay). But each of these essays, like the author himself, covers a lot of territory, from life in Alaska (“the size of two Texases,” Tyler reminds us) to banana farms in Hawaii, hitchhiking in Montana, leaving his native Oklahoma, and hanging out in the Bay Area of California, “trimming friends’ marijuana for supplemental income.” From these and other geographical jumping-off points, Tyler takes us on a journey about family, love, sex, physics, Native American rock writings, ultramarathoning into the hottest places of the U.S., close encounters with bears, and many and sundry internet rabbit holes that have piqued his curiosity over the years.
What makes each of these fifteen essays so interesting and enjoyable is the way Tyler deftly connects seemingly unrelated ideas and weave them into a cohesive fabric. His nonlinear, hopscotch lateral thinking style shines through in every essay. As he writes in “Stop Making Sense,” he is “plagued by ideas.” His mind is like “a drunk toddler grabbing flash cards. … Though I may not understand it when I begin, something is connecting the disparate strands.”
The result, as he puts it in the interview below, is a set of essays, each of which “is a tiny vessel exploring the mosaic of my experience, sticking to one thing for a few seconds before moving away to see what jumps up from the goo next.”
An adventurous soul who has endured some of the most extreme climates and conditions in North America, Tyler is also the product of a single-parent household and some of the common and not-so-common realities such a life brings, and he and his wife are new parents. He’s also Blake Shelton’s stepbrother, a tidbit some writers (like myself) might latch on to as fodder for an essay all its own. But that factoid barely merits a mention in Denali, Alaska. Tyler simply has too many other interesting things to say.
Denali, Alaska is Tyler’s fifth book and first essay collection. Many of the pieces were previously published in popular alt-lit magazines over the past few years. You can find all his books on his website, as well as some of his essays and other writings. Until this year, he also hosted a podcast called “Another Fucking Writing Podcast” (archived on his website) and for six years published an annual roundup of his favorite short stories.
Tyler now lives in a small town in Northern Arizona with his family.
Read on to learn more about Denali, Alaska, why Tyler stepped away from his podcast, why he prefers to write nonfiction, and more.
Continue reading “Friday Five: ‘Denali, Alaska’ author Tyler Dempsey”