Tuning In With Betsy  

Wm. Dietrich was born in 1951 in Tacoma, WA,. He graduated from Mount Tahoma High School  and attended Fairhaven College, an experimental liberal arts division of Western Washington University. His interest in writing led him to journalism at Western.

From Bellingham in 1974, he was sent to report from the state capital in Olympia and then covered Congress for Ga net News Service in Washington, D.C. He returned to the Northwest to write for the Vancouver Columbian in time to cover the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. In 1982 he took a job at the Seattle Times, where he has worked, on and off, ever since. He presently writes part-time for that paper’s Sunday magazine, Pacific Northwest.

Times assignments provided wonderful opportunities to report from the Arctic and Antarctic and to circle the globe, covering subjects ranging from the military to the environment. In 1987-88 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and in 1990 was part of a four-person team that won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. He won reporting and study fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Woods Hole Microbiological Institute, and Scripps.

His first book, The Final Forest, (1992) grew out of his reporting on the spotted owl and old growth forest debate. Northwest Passage (1995) is an environmental and cultural history of the Columbia River.

A 1994 fellowship to Antarctica helped him to take a stab at a lifelong goal of writing a novel by producing the World War II bio-terrorism thriller Ice Reich (1998). Its first draft was finished during a second reporting trip  to Antarctica.

He followed this with an Orwellian view of stultifying globalization and wilderness release in the Australian eco-fable Getting Back (2000) and then returned to Antarctica and the South Pole for the claustrophobic murder thriller Dark Winter (2001).

Dietrich has loved history since childhood. A 1996 visit to Great Britain led to the ancient Roman fortification across northern England known as Hadrian’s Wall. Even before his first novel was published he was determined to write a story about this evocative place,  the result is a war and romance novel set in Roman Britain called Hadrian’s Wall (2004).

 some of the essays he has written about nature for the Seattle Times were collected to create Natural Grace (2003). Royalties are donated to land preservation and environmental education.

Dietrich’s fascination with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire continued into a novel about Attila the Hun called The Scourge of God (2005).

Dietrich is  married and, has two grown daughters.