I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.

The media is in the business of finding exceptions to everyday life. Bad things are still the exception. That's good, because once bad things stop being news, we really are in trouble. If people forget that bad is the exception, they think they live in a horrible world. There is so much that works and is right and friendly and warm. But we take that for granted.

Tom Kizzia hasn't just observed and written about Alaska for three-plus decades, he's lived it. 'Pilgrim's Wilderness' is a story that needed to be told by the only man who could tell it.

I'm real. I believe what I'm saying. If Motel 6 wasn't the type of operation they say it is - and I stay at them when I travel - I wouldn't do their commercials. That comes through on the radio, and that's what it's all about.

In the America I see from here, anything is possible - especially the impossible.