Photos: Heather Lende's Haines

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A heart shaped rock sits along a walkway in front of Heather Lende's home in Haines, Alaska on Friday, April 24, 2015.

Haines' author Heather Lende is a mother, grandmother, runner and obituary writer at the Chilkat Valley News, work that helped inform her new book, "Find The Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-town Obituary Writer." Released by Algonqin Books just last week, it has already found a spot on the Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller List for hardcover nonfiction.

That's rarified air for Alaska authors. Palmer's Eowyn Ivey was the last Alaskan to claim a spot on that list for her book "The Snow Child", a 2013 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

But bestseller lists aren't new to Lende, who writes a regular column in We Alaskans. Her earlier book, "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name," earned a spot on the New York Times' bestseller list.

"Recently, I was asked to write a short essay describing one piece of wisdom to live by," she writes in the new book. "I thought about it but did not have a brief, easy answer. I have made enough mistakes in my life to fill a whole bookshelf of dos and don'ts. My friend John works as an investigator in the public defender's office but is a poet. That is probably why he managed to distill all his fatherly hopes and dreams into two rules for his only child: 'Be nice to the dog and don't do meth.' His son turned out kind, clear-eyed, and he graduated from a good college.

"I didn't have such pithy haiku wisdom at the ready. As an obituary writer, I lean toward elegiac couplets, and I have five children, which also adds a lot more variables. One size won't fit all of them…"

Now on a book tour, Lende will appear May 6 at the Ketchikan public library, May 7 at Old Harbor Books in Sitka, May 14 at UAA's Wendy Williamson Auditorium and the campus bookstore, May 16 in Petersburg's Sing Lee Alley Books, and May 29 at Hearthside Books in Juneau.

Photographer John Hagan, who shot this slideshow, is a Haines-based editorial and portrait photographer. Find his work here.