Storm Relief: An Alaskan Family Giving Back

Choose the donation level and destination that fits your interest. All donations will receive a link to download an eBook version of Moving Salmon Bay.

The eBook link can be found in the donation thank you and tax receipt email you receive directly after donating.

Any donations over $25 will be placed in a drawing to win the original and signed painting.

When Typhoon Halong struck Southwestern Alaska, the raging winds and turbulent waters left behind more than wreckage — this storm left families with nothing. How do you rebuild when you’ve lost everything, and the land you’ve called home for generations might be uninhabitable or unsafe?

To directly help those enduring what will likely be a long and arduous process of rebuilding, or relocation, Kuskokwim grown and raised author Don Rearden and his sister, artist Beth Hill, are donating their creative work to raise awareness and support for ongoing relief efforts in the region.

Out of what they feels is part desperation and urgent call to action with winter here, Don is contributing his novel, Moving Salmon Bay to the storm relief fundraising efforts. The book, inspired by a fictional coastal village on the edge of climate change and cultural loss. Written before the storm, Moving Salmon Bay now reads like a haunting echo of the very resilience, culture, resilience, and heart that define these Yup’ik communities facing real-world devastation.

Beth is donating the original painting that became the cover artwork for the eBook edition — a luminous, layered image of land and sea in transition. Her piece, like her brother’s novel, reminds us of what we stand to lose — and what we can still protect together.

All proceeds from this campaign will go directly to those affected by Typhoon Halong in Southwestern Alaska. Through this page you can direct your donation to the fund you feel most connected with, and feel confident your donation will reach the people in need of all our help.

Join Don and Beth in transforming art into action.
Together, we can help Alaska rise again — story by story, home by home.

Never before published in the U.S.A, this ebook edition of Moving Salmon Bay has been released by the author to raise donations and bring awareness to the relief effort for those displaced from Typhoon Halong in October of 2025. All proceeds from this edition will go to Bethel Community Services Foundation for storm relief to ensure the donations land directly into the hands of those most in need.

With a diverse cast of characters, Yup'ik children, parents, elders, and U.S. military personnel, Moving Salmon Bay shares the struggle of an entire Alaskan community on the verge of crashing into the Bering Sea.

This is the story of the citizens of Salmon Bay and the outsiders sent to relocate the endangered community.

Moving Salmon Bay offers an intimate glimpse into the contemporary lives of an impoverished rural Alaskan community suffering from the effects of global warming: melting permafrost, failing salmon runs, more powerful storms, and rising seas.

Readers will fall in love with the eclectic tapestry of unique characters and their struggles as the strands of each of their stories converge in a powerful story of redemption and hope.

The people of Salmon Bay face an unprecedented challenge. Their community and culture feels as if it could all disappear with the next Bering Sea storm. Each one seems to devour another home. The ground itself is melting, slumping into the rising sea, and with it go the stories, the laughter, and the ghosts of the people who’ve always called this village home. Can they survive the coming relocation?

The new storm that threatens Salmon Bay could never have been predicted—could this be the last one the village will ever know? By the time the barge arrives to carry them away, the people of Salmon Bay will learn that leaving home isn’t as simple as packing boxes—it’s a slow unraveling of everything that made you who you are.

Surprising, raw, and deeply human, Moving Salmon Bay is a story about what happens when the world you love begins to melt beneath your feet—and how, even in the face of enormous loss, a community can still find warmth in each other.

Moving Salmon Bay is the latest from the award winning author of The Raven's Gift -- which made The Washington Post Notable List for Fiction, calling Rearden “a master of the cliffhanger.” He co-authored the best-selling memoirs Never Quit and Warrior's Creed.

A Professor of Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage, his recent honors include Rasmuson Project Awards, a UAA Chancellor’s Award, a Contributions to Alaska Literacy Award, the Alaska Literary Prize for Fiction, and a finalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Screenwriting Contest. He grew up in Bethel and the villages of Akiak and Kasigluk and currently lives outside of Anchorage in the quirky mountain community of Bear Valley.

David James with the Anchorage Daily News called Rearden’s latest book of poetry, Without A Paddle, “an unsentimental but compassionate volume for anxious times,” and “the tonic many of us need right now.”