“Uncommon Weather: Alaska Stories” is the fifth book by Homer author Rich Chiappone and is intended to portray Alaska and Alaskans in a way not often represented.

“Alaska is depicted in popular media, like reality TV for example, as a place where everybody is crazy, backwoods and unfit to live anywhere else if they wanted to,” Chiappone said. “With this collection of stories, I’ve tried to disrupt that because all my characters are ordinary people. I’d like the world to know that there are people in Alaska who get up in the morning, go to work, don’t live in a cave and can make full and complete sentences. This book is full of schoolteachers, nurses and construction workers.”

The main character in Chiappone’s title story just wants to feel loved again. Instead of writing about the Alaska fisherman who goes out into the Bering Sea, he wrote about his wife who is stuck at home. A lonely woman who is mother to two young daughters and wife to a fisherman who is out to sea for weeks at a time, she has an affair with a man from her yoga class.

“She’s lonely and takes matters into her own hands by getting out there and living it up a little bit,” Chiappone said. “Her husband, when he finds out about the affair, has three words for her, which he repeats, often.”

Written in 2008, the story was inspired after Chiappone and his wife had dinner with friends, an older married couple who shared how they argue in their marriage.

“The wife said that all she can do is swear and she just starts swearing until she forgets what the fight is about,” Chiappone said. “The day after we got together with them, I was wondering if I could write a story with the dialogue only curse words. I tried, but I couldn’t keep it going, so I started out with one line, hearing the wife’s voice saying, ‘my husband has only three words for me.’ Then I came up with why her husband would be so mad at her and it just went on from there.”

Later in the story, the main character, who also plays hockey, plays in a game while drunk and ends up in a fist fight.

“My wife told me about the woman’s hockey team here in Homer, which I had no idea about, and an incident where a couple of women got into a fight at a game,” he said. “And so, suddenly my character was also a hockey player.”

In his story “Xtratuf,” a grandfather is raising his 15-year-old granddaughter, and she comes home barefoot one afternoon after someone stole her Xtratuf boots while she was at the meditation center. The story follows the familial relationships navigating the difficult terrain of substance abuse and rehab. While the main characters were not directly inspired by people Chiappone knows, the boot-stealing incident is a story he hears often.

“Everyone in Homer wears sneakers, Birkenstocks or Xtratufs, so your chances of having your shoes mistakenly taken is pretty high,” he said.

The story “So, Kenny the Sheet Rocker Sends for His Girl,” is based on a guy Chiappone used to work with who was on a remote work site when he got a call from a friend that their guns has been stolen. Flying back to Anchorage, he finds out that they were stolen by his wife and her drug dealer.

“Writing teacher Ron Carlos says that there are only three places that a fiction writer can get information from,” Chiappone said. “Either it’s something they’ve seen or that has happened to them, something they’ve read or heard about or something they make up. All my stories are a combination of these three things.”

The author of several collections of short fiction and essays as well as a novel, Chiappone’s previous collections are autobiographical and personal. This collection strays from that, with one exception. “Little Wing” tells the story of a mother trying to get to her daughter’s funeral in the Lower 48 from remote Alaska. Stranded at the Anchorage airport, she notices a baby bird that has fallen out of its nest, and she tries to simultaneously ignore and save it.

“This was my attempt to write about the pain of losing my own daughter,” he said. “Early on in my writing, I was using fiction as cheap therapy and was rehashing all the catastrophes of my life. Fiction can be useful in that you can give the characters your situation and see how they handle it, but you’re safe, living vicariously with distance as a buffer.”

Born and raised in Niagara Falls, New York, Chiappone married in 1969 at the age of 20 and worked construction during the day and played bass in a bar band at night. In 1980, he divorced and moved to Las Vegas to work the construction boom. There he met Lin and in 1980 the couple moved to Alaska for the adventure and his love of fishing and started a wallpapering business in Anchorage.

With no prior inclination towards writing, Chiappone wrote his first story in 1986 at the age of 38 when the Anchorage Daily News and the University of Alaska offered a writing contest open to the public.

“Lin told me I should write a story since I was always telling stories,” he said. “At that time, I had been divorced for about five years and was separated from my daughters by 4,000 miles. The short story I wrote was about a man and his son fishing together. The parents are divorced and the man is trying to bond with the boy but doesn’t do it too well. It got an Honorable Mention and Lin encouraged me to go back to school and learn to write my stories.”

In 1986, Chiappone enrolled at the University of Alaska Anchorage, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1991 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1993.

“I took it as a challenge to see if I could write,” he said. “I come from a neighborhood where everyone is full of s—-. At Niagara River, we’re all fishermen so we’re all big liars and my friend, John, was the best liar of all. He lied to his parents, teachers, police. When Lin and I got married, we went back east to visit family, and she heard all these stories. That’s why years later she was comfortable telling me, ‘You’re full of s—-, you could be a writer.’”

Chiappone’s first approach to writing was autobiographical, reliving what he considered to be his mistakes and his regrets.

“Then I tried to be intellectual, and that experiment was a disaster,” he said. “My mentor told me to stop thinking about what I was writing and just write a story. When my daughter died in 2004, I found that I couldn’t write fiction for a while. I’d create characters and then live in their skin for as long as a story took, but then every character died of cancer. I still wanted to write, so for a few years I wrote comedy — ridiculous, absurd essays about life in Alaska for the Anchorage Press. That loosened me up and got me out of thinking about my grief and eventually I was able to write fiction again. Part of this was also when my editor from the Press called me wanting to run a short story fiction piece and asked if I had something for him. I always say yes, even if I don’t have anything, so I sat down and wrote “Little Wing.” That was a big breakthrough, and I was finally able to write fiction again.”

In 1994, Chiappone began teaching as a part-time adjunct with UAA, working construction during the day and teaching narrative structure in the evenings. In 2002, the couple moved to Homer where he taught night school part time until he was offered a position teaching in the newly formed low residency program in Anchorage in 2008. Today, retired from construction and teaching, he occasionally hosts writing workshops at the library and teaches community writing classes at the local college campus.

“One of the joys of my life has been teaching,” he said. “I love to talk about writing.”

“Uncommon Weather” — as with his first three books, “Water of An Undetermined Depth,” “Opening Days,” and “Liars Code” — is a collection of stories written and previously published in magazines, including Catamaran Literary Review, Crescent Review Playboy, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Missouri Review, Playboy and The Sun, among others. His novel, “Hunger of Crows,” is a Homer crime thriller.

While he continues to write and publish his short stories, he is also working on another book, and just this week he received a contract for a sequel to his novel.

“I’m older and tired and taking more naps, but I’ve never been more prolific with my writing,” he said. “I have two novels out with publishers right now — one is a Homer crime novel, and the other is one I’ve been working on for 30 years, a coming-of-age historical fiction novel based on the town where I grew up.”

Disciplined in his writing, he writes every day and enjoys creating characters that are like the individuals he encounters in his day-to-day life — ordinary people.

“I think it’s okay to write a story about guys that are not bull fighters, but construction workers,” he said.

“Uncommon Weather: Alaska Stories” is published by the University of Alaska Press and is available in Homer at the library and the Homer Bookstore.

On Tuesday, Dec. 17 at 7 p.m., Chiappone joins Homer journalist Tom Kizzia at the Homer Public Library for “Imagining the Past,“ a discussion on the joys and challenges of writing about historical events and individuals.

Learn more about Chiappone on his website, www.chiappone.us.