Show 82: Excerpt - Detour: From Mongolia to Alaska

AN ALASKAN NOVELIST gave us the idea for this program a few months ago. She wrote to us to pitch a number of story ideas and she ended the list with this: I can imagine an entire show about life detours, including ones that ended happily, which must be a strong Alaska theme, given how people often wind up here in surprising ways. Well, we wholeheartedly agreed and so we asked her to write something on the theme of "life's detours" to set the tone for this program.

Listen below to Andromeda Romano-Lax reading an original essay on her life's biggest detour so far - from Mongolia to Alaska...

Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of The Spanish Bow, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2007, as well as her new novel, The Detour published in February 2012 by Soho Press. It's a novel about art, adventure, and second chances, set in pre-World War II Italy. She lives in Anchorage with her husband and two children. Visit her online.