Other Books & Writing

North of Hope

A Daughter’s Arctic Journey

When her parents are killed by a grizzly bear in Alaska’s remote Arctic, author Shannon Huffman Polson is forced into a wilderness of grief. Her quest for healing is recounted with heartbreaking candor in North of Hope. Polson travels from her home in Seattle to the wilderness of Alaska, where she retraces her father and stepmother’s final days along an Arctic river, effortlessly weaving together the internal landscape of grief with the exterior landscape of the Arctic, elegantly entwining natural history, adventure and sacred pilgrimage while she wrestles with and draws strength from her faith and memories.

“North of Hope is a remarkable story about the power of the wilderness both to harm and to heal, and to provide strength and sustenance to the human spirit, no matter what the challenges.”Nicholas O’Connell, author, The Storms of Denali

The Way the Wild Gets Inside

Field Notes from Alaska

Author and native Alaskan Shannon Huffman Polson brings you essays about wild Alaska and the beautiful and charged relationship between humans and the wild. She considers an encounter with a grizzly bear in Alaska’s far northern Arctic, taking care of a log cabin in Denali, an encounter with an Arctic wolf, and other experiences of her home state, with the same lyric beauty and probing intensity offered in her memoir North of Hope: A Daughter’s Arctic Journey.

“A lovely albeit too-short read. Shannon Huffman Polson’s voice rings with informative, tender, and fiercely authentic observations about how life plays out in the wild places of her Alaskan home.”Debbie Moderow

The Road Ahead

Fiction from the Forever War

This collection of stories from veterans who have served as part of “The Forever War” includes Polson’s “Brown Bird,” her first published fiction. These masterfully crafted stories from writers who have served reflect the entire breadth of human emotion—loss, anger, joy, love, fear, and courage—and the evolving nature of what has become America’s “Forever War.”

“An anthology of stories covering a literary terrain as expansive as the seemingly endless ‘war on terror’ that spawned it. These stories provide plenty of revelation on the nature of the war and the soldiers who continue to fight it.”Kirkus Reviews

The Little Book of Grit

Quotes from leaders across the military branches on leadership and grit guaranteed to inspire and encourage your own journey of grit! A synthesis of these lessons learned and stories was published by Harvard Business Review Press as The Grit Factor.

Family Dinners

100 Conversations About the Good Life: Classic Texts and Socratic Questions for Families with Tweens and Teens

What if the dinner table became the most interesting place in your family’s week? Family Dinners gives parents and children a reason to linger — one hundred carefully curated conversations drawn from the greatest minds in human history, made accessible for families with tweens and teens aged 11 to 18.