Until his retirement from wages, Jerry McDonnell, writer and actor, taught school in the native villages of Alaska, was a hunting guide in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho and Montana and a bear viewing and fly-fishing guide in Alaska. Currently he has dropped hook in Anchorage, Alaska. As a member of the Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges he volunteers in Refuge projects: invasive plants, walrus counts, and science camps for kids, which increases his latitude to continue his love of wild places running rivers and being out there in the out there. Before Alaska, he lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for 15 years or so working at Lake Tahoe. Somehow in his 30’s he earned a B.A. in Drama. His life has been a potpourri of occupations: gambling casino employee, wilderness guide, actor, freelance writer, newspaper reporter, dance instructor, schoolteacher, commercial fisherman out of San Francisco Bay and explorer of diverse jobs (he once took a job as a buyer for a large company in Oakland, California, but the necktie was choking him to death and he made more money than he could spend).
His fiction stories have been published in The South Dakota Review, Over the Transom, Explorations, Dan River Anthology, North Woods Journal, Driftwood. Over the years his Journalism credits include The Peninsula Clarion (Kenai, Alaska), The Anchorage Daily News, The Alaska Journal of Commerce, The Dispatch (Soldotna, Alaska). He wrote a weekly column in the Calaveras Enterprise (San Andreas, California) before moving to Alaska in 1990. His plays have had readings at the Valdez, Alaska Theater Conference and at the Atlantic Stage in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He has played small parts in movies; in his last stage role of 2012 he played the old guy, Norman, in On Golden Pond.
The last two issues of Over the Transom are now placed in the Tate Modern in London, England. A novel is in progress as is his one-year-old granddaughter.
His blog is all wonderful liable lies: Alaska Reflections
