Authors in Conversation: "A Creek, a Hill, & a Forty" with Ray Bonnell
Schedule
Wed, 25 Mar, 2026 at 06:00 pm
UTC-08:00Location
721 2nd Ave, Fairbanks, AK, United States, Alaska 99701 | Fairbanks, AK
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In the 40 years Ray has been tramping the back roads and trails of Eastern Interior, Southcentral, and Southeast Alaska, he has been documenting the regions’ historic sites through sketches, photos and notes. For 12 years he produced a historical column for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner newspaper. That column won the Alaska Historical Society’s Contributions to Alaska history award. To date, he has produced five books on Alaska history.His wife, Betsy, was born and raised in Palmer, Alaska, and grew up in the first colonist house completed in 1935 for the Matanuska Colony, a New Deal agricultural resettlement project. Her mother and grandparents emigrated to Alaska in 1935 as part of the colony. Betsy’s grandmother, Margaret Miller, was an erudite and talented writer, and after arriving in Alaska, she wrote weekly multipage letters to her mother in Wisconsin. Those letters are still in the family’s possession.
Upon marrying Margaret’s granddaughter, Ray inherited the dream that Margaret had of turning those letters into a book. Forty years in the making, that book, A Creek, a Hill, and a Forty, was published in 2024. Since then, Betsy has been working on a companion book—an oversize scrapbook containing newspaper clippings, letters from relief agencies, bulletins, programs from community events, sheet music, and other colony-related ephemera.
Join us for an evening of conversation about Margaret’s book, and a peek inside the scrapbook.
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Where is it happening?
721 2nd Ave, Fairbanks, AK, United States, Alaska 99701Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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