Goodreads asked Bonnye Matthews:

How do you get inspired to write?

Bonnye Matthews I moved to Alaska in 2005 having wanted to do that much sooner. To learn about my environment I researched to discover who the first Alaskans were, thinking they were the first Americans (North and South America). The research kept me busy for five years of intense study, and I'm convinced there is no answer to the question, except Alaska was IMHO not the first place in the Americas where people came. In Mexico a human skull fragment lay under volcanic debris. It dated to about 250,000 years ago, too early for Cro-magnon. There are over 400 sites that are thought to show evidence of human habitation before the Ice Age in the Americas. That was the first set of seeds of inspiration.

The second set of seeds of inspiration comes from Alaska itself. I'm sharing some of these inspiration seeds as tidbits on my youtube page where you can see a young bald eagle eat a creamer at the creek behind my home and a moose and calf outside my front door. More is to come. (Search Bonnye Matthews at youtube to see.) Some other seeds include, having crouched down in an ice cave on a glacier, gazing at the braiding Matanuska River, musk oxen, glacial erratics, Denali (a mountain some call Mt. McKinley), caribou, pink hillsides colored by blossoming fireweed, a humpback whale asleep in Prince William Sound, streams so filled with salmon that you'd step on them if you tried to cross, and many more. In case you're eager to know, humpback whales smell awful!

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