Thursday, April 12, 2012

Outside Magazine Pieces - Mark Sundeen on Noah Pippen / Peter Stark on living abroad / Mark Jenkins on wilderness first aid / "To the Arctic" IMAX

There were a few pieces of note from the May issue of Outside Magazine... including a tremendously good 10,000 word feature on a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness.

The Mark Sundeen piece is "Why Noah Went to the Woods" on Noah Pippen and it accomplishes the dual tasks of being thorough (again, 10,000 words) as well as captivating. The story is about a multiple-tour veteran and Sundeen does a very solid job of showing how war can impact someone and compel them to act in ways they wouldn't otherwise. It's also a suspenseful story that leaves one as a reader continually looking for what's next in the story.

Sundeen's writing is the most profound from this issue, but there were also a few other interesting pieces to note. "First, Do a Little Less Harm" was written by Mark Jenkins and this piece struck me from the perspective that Jenkins has been doing adventure activities all his life and just now taking a formal wilderness first aid class such as that he writes about.

Also of interest was a story by Peter Stark titled "Home and Away" on living in a Brazilian village for a year with his wife and two teenage children. It's good writing about a family definitely living different than most. Reading the piece made me interested in both Stark's book The Last Empty Places: A Past and Present Journey Through the Blank Spots on the American Map and the book his wife Amy Ragsdale is noted as writing about living abroad with children.

Finally, this issue also had an interesting interview with Shaun MacGillivray on the IMAX documentary studio founded by his father, Greg MacGillivray, and the new file To the Arctic being released shortly to museums and aquariums.