Prescription for Finding Home in Alaska is under contract with Tate Publishing and will be back in print in early 2011!

Tate Publishing has also extended a contract for Prescription for Adventure: Bush Pilot Doctor!

The manuscript 'A' is for Alaska: Teacher to the Nunamiut Eskimos has additionally been accepted by Tate Publishing and will be available for purchase by autumn 2011. Anna Bortel was Naomi's second-grade school teacher in Tanana, Alaska. In 1954, she left Ohio as a single woman and drove up the Alcan Highway to Valdez. She pushed further north, to the Athabascan Indian village of Tanana, in 1957. In 1960, she became the first permanent school teacher for the Nunamiut Eskimos, an ever-migrating-after-the-caribou people. She taught school in a log cabin chapel and lived in a tiny sod house. Her astonishing stories will make you laugh, cry, cringe, and catch your breath. Learn more about this remarkable woman.

A new book is in the making: Prescription for the Bush Doctor's Wife. Readers have expressed curiosity about the years in Tanana, 1957-1959. This era was introduced in both Prescription for Adventure books, but without in-depth details of daily life in the Interior Alaska Athabascan village. The focus of the previous books was on Doc and the Gaede family in general. A question remains: what about Ruby?

In the village of between 250 and 300 people, social life, purchases, and entertainment were limited to a Northern Commercial Company general store, three churches, community hall, Day School for grades one to eight, and whatever the FAA support staff, White Alice employees, hospital personnel, school teachers, or villagers themselves could provide or devise.

Ruby's days were a mish-mash of keeping track of four children, preventing one toddler from falling into the swift-flowing Yukon River; ordering a year's worth of canned and boxes food supplies to be brought in by river barge, before the river froze; befriending the Native women and learning from them their skills of beadwork, skin-sewing, and salmon-smoking; brainstorming sanity-preserver-fun of a Hobo Halloween party, hot dog picnics at 30 below zero, and a Sewing Circle — where she served up dainty treats of cream puffs or tiny sandwiches. She shot a moose and dressed it out. She baked twice a week, including hot dog and hamburger buns. On summer Sundays, she walked in high heels down the dusty Front Street to the chapel. This Kansas-born farm girl, accustomed to blazing sun, rolling wheat fields, and fresh produce, thrived.

Future books in the Prescription for Adventure series include:

• Prescription for Putting Down Roots at 50 Below
• Prescription for Turning a Boy into An Alaska Man
• Prescription for Surviving a Homestead: Floatplane, Burn Pile, Cranberries